Why the "@" before Contexts?

What’s the purpose of the “at sign” before Context names?

I also noticed in the main window that if I collapse a Context to hide its actions, the at sign appears before the name. Once I expand the context, the at sign disappears. How come?

Once upon a time, people used to implement GTD-ish systems by naming folders in their email systems with names starting with symbols, so that they’d stay at the top of the list, alphabetically.

In particular, @ seemed like a natural symbol to use for contexts, since (especially in pre-smart phone/ubiquitous internet times) contexts had names like ‘home’ and ‘school’ and ‘mall’, so you could sort of read ‘@home’ as ‘at home’.
So when we were building OmniFocus 1, we took a stylized @ for the context icon.

The @ disappearing when you expand a context sounds like a bug, which I am not seeing. Could you please post screenshots of where you’re seeing this?

Thanks for the explanation.

Here’s a context expanded that does not show the @ sign before the name of the context:

And here’s the same context collapsed, showing @ sign before the name of the context:

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but is it necessary to have the ‘@‘ symbol before every single instance in the sidebar? - it doesn’t impart any information, other than that ‘you are now in the context view’ - i suppose it’s possible to forget that you are in the context view and start looking for project items in the sidebar, so maybe change the coloration for the contexts sidebar? just a thought.

It’s visual clutter. I know I’m on the Contexts screen. Really wish that design decision had not been made. Serves absolutely no purpose, just tells me what I already know and visually clutters the screen.

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