Zotero 7 Beta: Fast display of the Info Pane when switching between tabs

mjthoraval

I often need to get back quickly to one of the opened tabs. In order to find it, I quickly navigate between tabs with Ctrl+Page Up/Down. To check whether I have reached the correct tab, I first look at the Info Pane on the right side to check the metadata.
But if I switch quickly between tabs, I only get a "Loading..." at the top of a completely empty grey space below the tabs titles.

Would it be possible to first load the Info Pane when switching between tabs, so that it appears immediately? Or even keep it loaded in memory to get it even faster?
I understand that loading the viewer and the annotations can be slow depending on the size of the files and the number of tabs opened. But the Info Pane only contains text, so it should be immediate and should not use much memory.

DonnaCoxBaker

The new Actions and Tags for Zotero plug-in has a script at https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-actions-tags/discussions/172, which lets you create a shortcut to those tabs.

mjthoraval

Thank you for your reply. But that script is for switching between the tabs in the Item Pane. I am talking about switching between Viewer tabs here (PDF, EPUB, HTML), not the tabs of the Item Pane.

Switching between PDF tabs is too slow when multiple tabs are opened. I would like to see the Item Pane (Info/Tags/Related on the right side of the PDF Viewer) much faster when switching between PDF tabs.

martynas_b

@mjthoraval In theory this is doable and makes sense, but can you explain why just a tab title isn't enough for that?

mjthoraval

1) Depending on the paper I am looking for, I can either remember the year, the first author, the last author or the title of the paper. The tab title will always be too short to show all this information. It can only be optimized to show what the user think is the most useful information, but will never give unique information to identify the tabs.
2) Switching the name convention of tab titles needs to reload the tab, so this cannot solve the problem. Even if that was reloaded automatically, it would take too long to go to the preferences every time I want to switch.
3) The popup that shows up from mouse hovering on the tab title is too slow to solve the problem.
4) I usually show tabs as Creator - Year - Title, as I usually cite and remember articles by the first author and the year of publication. But if I have many tabs opened, I can only see the first author in the tab title. If I am reading several articles with the same first author, I do not have any way to differentiate the papers.
5) The tab name for secondary files starts with the attachement title. Depending on the origin of the files, that title can be quite random. For example, it can be "Supplementary Information PDF" for supplementary files, or "Snapshot" for webpages. There is no way to distinguish between them if several of them are opened together.
6) When better tabs management features are added, there will probably be easier ways to navigate the tabs, like (as mentioned here):

For tabs, we can probably do something like the down-arrow tab menu that appears at the right edge of the tab bar in Firefox and Chrome.

7) But there are probably other reasons why I would like to navigate quickly between tabs, so having a faster display of the metadata in the Info Tab would always be better. If there is no drawback in doing this, it would still be usefull.

martynas_b

Ok, we'll try to improve that. Thanks for the in-depth explanation.

mjthoraval

Thank you.