How do you mark a reference as read or unread?

cryptosorcerer · October 30, 2015

I assume this is something that people want to do, right?

I tried using tags but it seems when I search for the unread tag I get all items even if only the attachment is unread. So apparently how tags work is not suitable for this application. Any other suggestions?

adamsmith · October 30, 2015

I use a "to read" tag and that works fine. Why would you add that at the attachment level ever in the first place (and if you do have unread attachments, why wouldn't you want the top level item to show)?

cryptosorcerer · November 2, 2015

Maybe I'm doing something else wrong.

So my situation is: I add an entry it comes with a pdf. I mark the entry as "unread". Now when I filter for unread entries I also get all read entries because the attached pdfs have not been tagged.

I think why it works for you is because your tag is "positive" while mine is "negative". So I think using the "tag does not contain" type of search will always have this problem.

The reason why I would not want the top level item to show when there are unread attachments is because I think there should be a 1-1 correspondence between references and attachments. For the typical case of having a reference for a paper and the pdf of that paper this is pretty logical. It seems like it would be a weird restriction in general, though. Without such an option I think some other way to restrict a search would be necessary.

To give a different use-case: Say you have an entry that you have marked "read". Now you add a note to it and it suddenly shows up in your reading list again because it is searching for items which do not have the tag "read" and your new note does not have it.

And after writing all this I now realize that I can just use "Show only top-level items" and use tags only on those and then I can do what I want. I think it should be clearer that this not only changes the output (what is "shown") but also how the search is performed.

adamsmith · November 2, 2015

I agree the options in the advanced search are confusing. That interface needs an overhaul. (I do think the default behavior has a lot going for it, but that's a different debate)