Bug in v6 View\Layout options for Tag Selector

tim820

In the View menu the Layout options for panes are Collections Pane, Item Pane, and Tag Selector.

If you turn off the Collections Pane, you lose both the Collections Pane and the Tag Selector. That is, the Tag Selector should remain ... but it does not. A layout with only the Tag Selector set to ON instead shows only the standard middle pane.

If on the other hand you have all panes ON and then turn off the Tag Selector, the Tag Selector disappears but the Collections Pane remains, as it should.

So there is currently no way to get the Tag Selector alone as the left pane, despite what the View options imply.

If this can be fixed it would also be useful to add an option (to the drop-down display options in the Tag Selector) to display tags one-per-line.

Note that this is in Zotero v6 under Windows 10.

dstillman

I mean, that's not a bug, obviously. The View option just controls whether the tag selector is shown when you have the left pane open. This is how Zotero has always worked. The collections pane is more fundamental to Zotero usage — with all sorts of different views, group libraries, feeds, etc. — and it's easy to end up in another view (e.g., by selecting one from the Connector's save popup), so the collections pane is always shown when the left pane is open. I don't really see that changing. You can of course resize the tag selector almost all of the way up if you really want to.

tim820

I don't think I'm splitting hairs by thinking that selecting the Tag Selector and not seeing the Tag Selector would be categorized as a bug. ;)

Fixing it would help operations where one wishes to work specifically on one's tags. The suggested one-line-per-tag option would also help with that, as well as aiding the 'hierarchical tags lite' scheme that I recently described (which requires no other development work).

dstillman

I don't think I'm splitting hairs by thinking that selecting the Tag Selector and not seeing the Tag Selector would be categorized as a bug. ;)

Your misunderstanding how something works doesn't make it a bug. There's no guarantee that toggling something in a menu is going to have an immediate visible effect — it depends on the state of the app. The tag selector is a secondary subpane of the left pane — you can drag the splitter down to close the tag selector, whereas you can't drag the splitter up to close the collections pane. The View menu option is just another way of triggering the same action.

I explained above why the collections view has a higher priority in the view hierarchy. If you want to explain why a change would be useful for you, as you've done, that's fine, but insisting that something is a bug that needs to be "fixed" after the developers have told you it's working as designed is just going to annoy people.