Surprising behavior when deleting tags

JamieMartin

I wanted to delete two imported tags, so I selected both, let's say "History" and "Literature." I deleted them and got the standard warning they'd be deleted from all items. But what was actually deleted was only the intersection of the two sets.

So I was confused when "History" still appeared, on any items that had NOT had the "Literature" tag as well.

I was proud I figured it out eventually, thought others might be interested to know if it's not documented somewhere I overlooked.

bwiernik

That is definitely a weird and unexpected behavior. When you deleted the tags, did you have your library filtered on them?

adamsmith

You have to have the library filtered by multiple tags to delete them, which I think is what causes this behavior. Bulk-deleting text is not possible from the GUI at this time, though it's been requested a bunch.

bwiernik

This sounds like they are right-clicking on the tag selector and deleting the tag, which I would expect to delete them from the entire library?

dstillman

Right, it's not actually possible to delete multiple tags at once via right-click. If you select multiple tags and then right-click on one to delete it, Zotero will just delete the tag you actually clicked. I suspect that's all @JamieMartin saw here — nothing to do with the intersection between the tags, etc.