Empty context titles appearing in perspectives - and how to hide them

Here is an example of my main “Today” perspective as seen in r209273

And here is the same “Today” perspective as seen in r209302

As you can see, all of the context headers are displayed in the perspective view rather than just the ones with an active item(s).

Is this a new “feature”?

P

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I can confirm I’m seeing the same thing in r209326. I’ll email it in.

I noticed this, too, immediately. I reported it and a request has been noted to change it back.

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It should also be noted that this strange display behavior occurs when the Perspective’s Presentation options are set to:

Group actions by: Context
Sort actions by: Project

Amazing how such a simple change can make the app appear so much more sloppy now. My nice clean perspectives are now all cluttered with irrelevant and unused headers.

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I’ve reported this as well. I’m seeing it in my perspective that has the following options:

Group actions by context
Sort actions by duration

I feel dumb asking this, but where should I be “reporting” this other than in this forum?

Please send email to ofpreview@omnigroup.com. That is our only official reporting channel.

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Thanks for all the feedback! The change was intended to make it easier to do things like select two contexts in the sidebar and drag tasks between them, and to reduce some other confusion surrounding empty contexts. But clearly this change has introduced noise into some perspectives that really shouldn’t have that sort of clutter.

Ultimately, adding support for focusing on contexts similar to our support for focusing on projects would help with this problem since you could use focus to do the things you’re doing above, rather than using selection. But that’s obviously not something we have time to do for the initial 2.0 release.

We’re coming down to the wire for making changes to 2.0, but maybe we can at least put in a hidden preference you can use to turn this off. (If not for 2.0, then perhaps for an update shortly afterwards.)

OK, here are URLs you can use to control this behavior in r209607. The first turns off empty contexts in the main outline, the second turns them back on, and the third returns to whatever our default behavior is:

omnifocus:///change-preference?MainOutlineIncludesEmptyContexts=false
omnifocus:///change-preference?MainOutlineIncludesEmptyContexts=true
omnifocus:///change-preference?MainOutlineIncludesEmptyContexts

We don’t think hidden preferences are the ideal solution to every problem, but we hope this at least helps the situation for now!

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hum… I tried to run this in Terminal, but it told me the file didn’t exist… any ideas for someone not-so-familiar with the Terminal?

Enter it as a URL in your web browser.

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Thanks Ken and co. for the quick and dirty trick! I am now no longer overwhelmed by all my empty contents.

Thank you! It’s great to get the clean look back again.

Thanks Ken! Those URL hacks are like a bit of magic.


Thank you - nice to have all my actions in one screen now. Although it did make me review whether it is time to retire some contexts…

In previous iterations of OmniFocus 2, if you selected a subset of contexts from the side menu, you would only see contexts/context headers under which were were “active” actions.

Example, you choose “Office” for the context, the main window might show “three” nested Office contexts where there were “active” actions (let’s say, for this example, that you were only looking at flagged actions).

Now, under the same circumstances, if you choose “Office”, it shows you all the context headers in the main window, whether or not there is an “active” action or now. You might just see a context header and nothing beneath it.

Is there a way to hide those context headers that have no active under them?

Yes, there is. Please see the existing thread on this topic.

threads merged.

I tried this in the latest test build of v87 r209636 and it didn’t work. Is there any update for the latest release? Thanks!