Thanks Mark!
On the issue of Agents, I use them extensively normally and in fact that’s how the file was originally set up.
I didn’t mention this in the original post, because I didn’t want to confuse the feature request, which I think stands on its own, but I started looking at the Attribute Browser because this particular file was becoming increasingly flaky and I think the agents were probably to blame in some way. I was reducing them one by one to debug it, when I started to look at the AB in more detail and found it would probably do most of what I was using the Dashboard for anyway — and the two feature requests would make it more so.
This particular file is about six years old now and there’s a lot of cruft in it — some of the data has been exported and imported between org mode / bookends / DTPO more than once. I think what’s happening is that there are some odd characters in there which get in the way, causing the program to crash (every few minutes in fact).
I haven’t really had time to investigate further yet (not in enough detail to send in a meaningful report yet anyway). Instead I’ve exported to plain text and started again with a new file just to keep working.
As a general question: is there a set of troubleshooting steps for such circumstances? Apart from the obvious, such as deleting agents one by one till it stops occurring, are there are any known triggers I could look for in the file itself, such as problematic characters in certain types of attribute etc?
A new name for Attribute Browser? Mmm — Spreadsheet View? Table View? Nothing really springs to mind that’s definitely better.
Thanks again.