Feature suggestion: button to collapse ALL subcollections

dchahim

This is hopefully a very easy addition to what is already a wonderful piece of software: I wish there was a button that you could hit to collapse all open collections in Zotero. I for one have a lot of collections - perhaps two dozen, and within them sometimes have 2-3 levels of further subcollections. And between all these, I have many items that appear in 3-4 subcollections, if not more. When I try to highlight (using CTRL-click) a popular item to see what collections it is in, a bunch of collections, subcollections, and sub-subcollections etc. open up. Now this makes the library very hard to browse, so I have to go through and manually collapse all these collections. It's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it becomes a pain when you're trying to organize your library and create a new bibliography for a project and make sure all the right articles are in it.

It would be great to have a button that just collapsed all the collections and subcollections at once. The little triangle button next to My Library just hides all my collections - that's not what I want. I just want to be able to see the list of main collections.

Let me give an example:

1) I start with this in the left pane:

My Library:
Anthropology
Geography
History
Sociology

2) Say I CTRL-click on an article, and it is in the four subcollections Evolutionary and Technology, now I have this:

My Library:
Anthropology
--->Sociolinguistic
--->Biophysical
-------->Evolutionary
-------->Malthus
Geography
History
--->Europe
-------->Technology
Sociology

3) Now I want to CTRL-click another article, and even more subcollections open up. Soon I have something like this:

My Library:
Anthropology
--->Sociolinguistic
--->Biophysical
-------->Evolutionary
-------->Malthus
Geography
--->Marxist
------>Structuralism
History
--->Europe
-------->Technology
Sociology
--->Development
-------->Modernity

4) If you imagine a real library with 2 dozen main collections (what I here label Anthropology, Geography, etc), and doing a lot of poking around/reorganizing, you can suddenly have 20 different collections you need to close manually to get back to the clean starting point that you want, which is this:

My Library:
Anthropology
Geography
History
Sociology


It seems like an unnecessary chore - does anyone else have this problem? Is there a simple fix or workaround?

dstillman

Press "-" (minus), and then right-arrow to reopen the root. ("+" does the opposite.)

adamsmith

and then right-arrow to reopen the root.

still learning new things...

Gurdas_Sandhu

I am not sure if @Dan Stillman answered the OP's question. The OP wants to collapse all sub-collections but leave the primary collections visible and listed. Won't Dan's shortcut collapse everything, including the primary collections?

@dchahim Have you considered using Tags to manage and browse your collection? There are pros and cons to each approach, and you may find your own sweet mix.

adamsmith

minus collapses everything, the right-arrow then expands it to just show the primary collections, so it does exactly what the OP was asking.

Gurdas_Sandhu

Ah, got it. Thanks.