Dear Thortspace … How can I search for thorts I have hash tagged so I can then group them by hashtag?
Perhaps the first thing to say is just that you can drag thorts around to move them into groups… I’m assuming you know that, and that you know a lot of the basics of using Thortspace. So the following assumes that you are looking for extra tips and tricks to make using Thortspace an extra good experience for people who want to take Thortspace a bit further.
That having been said, yes, I guess we probably ought to have group by hashtag functionality, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have it currently, apart from in the sense that you can (1) search for any word, hashed or not, both across all your spheres, and within any given sphere, and then (2) there are a few different ways to manipulate group membership additional to just dragging Thorts around.
If you go the Search tab and choose “Spheres” at the top (Fig.1), and you are logged in, the search will scan across all the content within all your spheres. (If you are not logged in, it searches across only the sphere names of locally stored spheres.) If you choose “Thorts” at the top (Fig.2), it will just search the current sphere for the search text.
In the example below I find I have two spheres (out of the 500 odd I have made) which contain the word “Millenials” or related words such as Millenium that appear either in the name of the sphere or in text content on the sphere.
So then if I select “Thorts” at the top (Fig.2), and do the same search, it finds there is one thort on the current sphere that has that text… Clicking on that Thort on the search list will bring in front and centre and make it flash for a few seconds, and become selected on the sphere (so on desktop versions, you can then just press the return key to lift it up for editing).
I happen to have chosen an example which only had one matching thort on the given sphere, but if the text is in multiple thorts, or in Group text as well, all of those Groups would be listed on the search list.
To illustrate this point I have made a second thort that has the text in.
I’m afraid the next part is not ideal, because firstly I think it only works on the desktop versions of the software (Windows Mac and Linux) and secondly because it is a bit a fiddly. But that said, you can do it as follows…
(1) Go round the sphere and Control-click or Command-click on the thorts that you want to include in the group (you may have to use the search list to find them). This will select all the thorts you want to group. (Fig.3)
(2) Now to move them all into the same group, choose a place for the group to go on the sphere and Control and Right-click on it. (Fig.4)
The thorts you have selected will come together and form a group at the place where you Control and Right-clicked… (!)
Something that may help here is categories.
You can apply a category to all the thorts you have selected using the
“Apply to Selection” menu item on the Category swatch… (Fig.5)
But you can also just pick up a category by clicking on the swatch on the tab, and then click on all the thorts you want to apply it to in turn. (Fig.6)
Applying categories may make it easier to keep track of the Thorts you want to group.
Now, depending on the circumstances, we have a bit of functionality in the product that will move all the thorts in each category into a group. (Fig.7)
It would be nice if we had this for single categories as well, but that is not currently implemented.
Very important !
If you press the “Group By” category button (as per Fig.7) and don’t like the result, don’t forget the “Undo” button at the top of the screen will put everything back where it was !
More about using categories in Thortspace is here:
Other related things
(1) The orginal reason why we introduced hashtags into Thortspace.
In the animated gif below, notice the red thort just to the left of the mouse cursor hand. When you’re zoomed in, you can see it says “Need an option button to #bypass the #tutorials”. As you zoom in and out, Thortspace applies automatic summarising of the words you put into each Thort. When it’s zoomed out to its farthest extent, you can see only the words #bypass and #tutorials are still showing.
Thortspace cuts down the number of words displayed in each thort as a user zooms out because once text gets below a certain resolution it becomes hard to read. So Thortspace picks out the most important words in any given Thort, and opts to display fewer words at a larger size the further you move away from a sphere. (Fig.8)
Now because our algorithm for doing this automatic summarising doesn’t always give you the result you would prefer, we enable a way for you to specify which words in any given Thort at the most important words, ie. the ones that should be kept as a priority over others when you zoom out so far that there is only enough space to display a few words in the thort.
The convention we adopted to tag the most important words was the hashtag. People are familiar with using hashtags for similar purposes, and it is a convenient character to use in this way.
(2) Another way to manipulate group membership which may be more enjoyable for some users.
An alternative way of making the group in the example above is to use the search bar itself to adjust group membership.
Using the same very simple example above:
Step 1: Select “Thorts” at the top of Search tab, and search the current sphere for the thorts contain the text I am interested in, in the case of my example “#Millenials”.
Step 2: Drag the thorts you want to combine into a single group up or down the search list to move them into the same group. You will see the effect you are making on the sphere after you move each Thort, so if you don’t like the result at any stage, you can press the Undo button.
Step 3: Check the result on the sphere to make sure you got what you wanted:
(3) If you’re interested in the sphere that the examples in this article were based on, you can view it here:
