Drag-and-Drop to move items between Collections

bbogart

I often use multiple collections in Zotero to organize a subset of my sources, for example important or less important. I funnel as much as possible into one collection and then move items into an "important" collection once it has been read. Now I have to drag the source into the new collection, open the collection to make sure it made it (as there is no visual indication), and then delete the item from the source collection. A right-click or keyboard shortcut to move an item would be really handy.

Also I think it would be ideal if the hierarchies of collections were actually hierarchical. Right now you can put items in a child collection that are not in the parent, which means regardless of the organization of the children, really these nested folders are just independant isolated folders not related to one and other.

The idea is that a parent folder automatically contains all the sources from its children, which makes organizing my sub-collection even more powerful.

Thanks!

raf

Not sure whether this is what you would like to see:

To display all sub-items in a collection with sub-folders, enter about:config in the URL bar of your Firefox browser. There you will see a long list of technical stuff. What you need in this list is: extensions.zotero.recursiveCollections. There is a filter on top of the list which helps you to find this item (type "recursive"). Then, double-click extensions.zotero.recursiveCollections to set the value to "true." From now onwards all items in sub-folders will also appear in the parent-folder.

You see, Zotero has all these hidden treasures. Perhaps one day they will be less hidden.

PS: Note that the last time they wrote about this in the forums, it was not properly tested. I have been using this for months now and it seems to work just fine.

bbogart

Thanks!
That is an improvement, but I still have to drag an item into a subfolder, go into the subfolder to make sure it copied, and then manually delete it. A "move" rather than "copy" would be a huge improvement.

Thanks for your help!

sean

Holding down the option key (Mac) or ctrl key (Windows) will show you which collections contain an item.

bbogart

Hmmm, perhaps that feature is just not working on Linux? Control dragging and dragging do the same thing (the item is copied), though the icons are different, a "+" next to the icon when control-dragging and an arrow for dragging. Alt and Shift don't change the icon and don't behave any differently.

RyanJaredMartin

Thank you so much for this tip! It is very helpful.

ftr

Has these feature been implemented ? in 2009 Dan Stilman said it was on the to-do list but a search on the forum and in the change logs does not show any implementation. Or did I search with the wrong terms ?

dstillman

It has not yet been implemented.

seans_potato_biz

+1 for drag = move, drag + ctrl = copy (this is what the cursor implies is happening with the '+')