Views or View/Hide certain panes

bjohas

Hi all,

One feature that would be great is if there were different "views", e.g. which panes to view, and which columns to show in the middle pane. I often find myself either just wanting the middle+right, or the middle + left, or just the middle (but with more columns). At the moment, it's very fiddly (standalone, OS X) to even change the width of the different panes.

This partially relates to previous discussion here:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/36738/keyboard-shortcut-for-infonotestagsrelated

Would be great to have!
Bjoern

bjohas

Just to add to this. According to mailing list, hiding the right hand panel is coming in 4.1. However, it would be really useful to also be able to hide the left hand panel.

Use case: When reviewing papers on certain topics, I often work with a few papers in the same collection, for which it's useful to just see the middle / right panel.

Completely hiding the panes is not essential - being able to adjust the sizes would be sufficient, i.e. being able to set the width of certain panes to something small, or being able to adjust the width of the panes to custom values, depending on the task. Is this currently possible with javascript?

(Part of the problem is that with Zotero stand alone on OS X, adjusting the width of the panes is very fiddly.)

Similarly, it would be really good to be able to simply adjust (or perhaps reset?) the column widths in the middle pane, or have a special treatment for "added / last modified".

Use case: I often want to temporarily see when something was added or modified. However, it's a very wide column, so I tend to want to hide it again in favour of other fields. At the moment, it requires a lot of manual adjusting. So if you could save/restore columns, or reset column widths in some way, that would solve the issue.

B

adamsmith

you can already hide both the left and the right-hand pane in the current version of Zotero.

adamsmith

and you can click to hide or show, so no clumsy drag is necessary. I don't think there'll be an option to customize different views. I can see the use, but not the cost benefit.

bwiernik

You can already adjust the sizes of both the right and left panes by dragging their edges. You can hide them completely by clicking the "grippy" in the center of the pane border.

You can also change the widths of the columns in the middle pane by clicking on the border between two columns and dragging it. The size of the column on the left will be adjusted. You can change the column order by clicking on the column title and dragging it to another position. When you hide a column and then re-show it, it remembers the width you had set and the position the last time it was visible.

Edit: adamsmith types faster than me.

bjohas

Thanks!

I should have mentioned that I use Zotero stand alone / OS X, in case that's different. Yes, you can adjust pane widths, but it's extremely fiddly. I.e. the area where the mouse pointer turns to the "adjust" pointer is very narrow. I can't see a "grippy"... (bar the horizontal divider between tree/tags in left pane). Does the FF version have thicker (vertical) dividers between the panes?

Also, in stand alone, I can't see "hide / show" buttons...

Regarding the middle pane - thanks! I hadn't realised you could drag the columns about, but by dragging the "modified date" column to the right, the show/hide for that column works. So that's good enough.

Any more thoughts on adjusting the main pane sizes more easily?

adamsmith

again, you can click, which also requires the right spot, but gets you out of dragging. Click in the middle of that bar. making these thicker is, I think, being considered, but it's obviously ugly for people who don't want them (and may also not be entirely trivial with the mozilla framework Zotero uses, not sure about that).

dstillman

At least on OS X, you can't click to close, only to open. The grippy appears only when closed. You have to drag the 1px splitter to close. (And yes, it's true that the splitter is very narrow, which is something we'd like to address. Ideally we'd be able to make the click area wider than the visible area, but that may not be possible.)

bjohas

Sorry, don't quite follow. Where do I click? So far, I'm click-dragging on the borders between left/middle and middle/right panes... can't see 'hide' button, or elsewhere to click...

bjohas

Aaaah, ok. Yes, when closed the grippy is there.

bjohas

Is there a way of hiding the left/right pane with javascript, that could be called via zutilo? I've previously tried that, but I couldn't quite get it right.

(I think I tried to hide "zotero-items-tree" https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/4.0/chrome/content/zotero/zoteroPane.xul#L342, c.f. https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/36738/keyboard-shortcut-for-infonotestagsrelated)

dstillman

document.getElementById('zotero-collections-pane').setAttribute('collapsed', 'true');

document.getElementById('zotero-item-pane').setAttribute('collapsed', 'true');

bjohas

Thanks!!

bjohas

Have added shortcuts to Zutilo to hide/show collections/item pane.
(c.f. github https://github.com/bjohas/Zutilo, https://github.com/willsALMANJ/Zutilo).

kithairon

@bjohas: On OSX as well – and missing the grippy to close panes quickly. Thanks for adding the shortcuts to your version of zutilo; I just installed it and they work a treat. Very useful addititon!

bjohas

Thanks! Glad it's of use!

bjohas

Hi Dan,

I just noticed that if you use the above javascript commands, the collapsed left/right panes don't have grippies.

What would I need to do to get the panes to collapse and show a grippy?

Bjoern

dstillman

This might do it:


document.getElementById('zotero-collections-pane').setAttribute('collapsed', 'true')
document.getElementById('zotero-collections-splitter').setAttribute('state', 'collapsed')

document.getElementById('zotero-item-pane').setAttribute('collapsed', 'true')
document.getElementById('zotero-items-splitter').setAttribute('state', 'collapsed')

And then "removeAttribute('state')" to go the other way.

bjohas

Dan, many thanks!

I've updated the code on github accordingly. There are two versions: one with removeAttribute and one without.

Without removeAttribute, the grippy stays until the width is adjusted, and then Zotero automatically removes it.

I think there'd be a case for keeping the grippy permanently visible.

B