I’d like to be able to see a list (with date) of the docs I’ve last edited, and when clicking on an item in this list, be taken to that doc, and the cursor inserted at the last location of the last edit.
This is sort of possible in the outline view by adding the “last modified” column and sorting by that column. However, the behavior does not seem to be consistent, the order of the outline lines (docs) seems to reflect the nested structure of the binder folders before it lists the edit history… defeating the purpose if the purpose is a navigable chronological list of edit (writing) history.
Here are two ways that I think get you what you want using current functionality:
If the relevant binder hierarchy is exploded out (i.e. no collapsed folders), then selecting everything there will make the Outline view (duly sorted) do what you want. Each item (doc or folder) will be flat-listed and sorted according to its own mod date.
Doing a project search or using a Smart Collection will give you a flat binder list of docs. So, if you can catch everything you want with a Smart Collection, then you can invoke that, select all the resulting docs in the binder and your outline will once again give you what you want.
Except of course this really doesn’t do what I want, what any user would want. Once in the outline view, navigating to a doc to edit either forces the user to bring up yet another edit window, or to loose the context of the last modified list of documents. Obviously, the way to solve this is to offer a way in the binder column to sort by date modified, to bring up a list of the last (20) documents modified, in chronological order, and to allow direct navigation to the point in those docs where the last modification was made. Would be even better of course, if the list provided showed the doc name, the date[/time]of the last edit, and a few lines of text bracketing the last edit.
I am any user, and I wouldn’t want that. When a document was edited is of no importance at all to me, and even less so the relative order between many documents in a project.
As far as seeing the date/time of last edit and so on, I think the answer there is to do your search, get the results into the outline view with the columns you want to see, then open up a second editor. Keep the outline view up and use it to navigate between the documents instead of the binder (you can even close up the binder for this). I think some of the built-in “Layouts” set this up for you automatically. You won’t lose the list in the outliner in this case (I have not tried this recently, so I’m going off of memory here).
Specifically to the behaviour you raise here: if you do not wish to have hierarchy hold more precedence over the outline view than the sort order itself, then it would be beneficial to view what you’re looking for as a flat list instead of loading the hierarchy. I do sometimes need to view things by modification date, and I have a couple of approaches for doing so:
For everything: I run a simple full project search for “*”, which simply returns a flat list of everything in the project (tweak settings to taste; for example you might want everything in the Draft only, that is set to be included in compile). Simple.
For more precise segments, I have a saved search collection that searches for: mdate:3m (or whatever, but in this case that will return a list of all items modified in the past three months, sometimes I want a hard date instead of relative, for certain types of revision jobs). Refer to Table 11.1, pg. 265 of the user manual PDF, for info on the available date ranges.
As noted above, you can sort the binder search result list right there in the binder itself rather than using the outliner. To refresh the sort, hit Return in the search field. But sometimes I’ll move the results over to an outliner split (click the hook arrow button in the search header bar) and enable the auto-load feature so what I click on in the outliner loads in the other editor (well, I have a saved layout for that, I don’t set it up manually every time). This frees up the binder to perform it’s natural function, but also allows for more flexible sorting options. Since viewing a search result in the outliner is something loaded into History, I can freely navigate without fear of having to set things up again—just right-click on the Back button arrow and jump straight to my result list. Since the result list is flat, sorting in the outliner works through hierarchy rather than with it.