Select multiple items, right-click to relate them
Hi,
I'm quite astonished that this doesn't work, actually.
I find the related-items quite a powerful feature, but I don't use it very often, mainly because it is cumbersome to establish links. One common situation, where it would be easily possible to speed up the linkage process, would be to add the feature to easily make selected items in the middle pane related items.
e.g. I want to simply select two (or more) items in the middle pane (either in the same folder or the results of a search), right-click on them, and have the option to "Relate items...", possibly below the entry "Merge items...".
I'm sure that this wouldn't be hard to implement, and it would make linking items so much easier.
Cheers, Matthias
I'm quite astonished that this doesn't work, actually.
I find the related-items quite a powerful feature, but I don't use it very often, mainly because it is cumbersome to establish links. One common situation, where it would be easily possible to speed up the linkage process, would be to add the feature to easily make selected items in the middle pane related items.
e.g. I want to simply select two (or more) items in the middle pane (either in the same folder or the results of a search), right-click on them, and have the option to "Relate items...", possibly below the entry "Merge items...".
I'm sure that this wouldn't be hard to implement, and it would make linking items so much easier.
Cheers, Matthias
If the user selects three or more items, should they then all be related to one another?
I saw another UI suggestion fly by some time ago, where someone suggested relating items by drag and drop (I drop A on B = I relate A to B). That would also be a very intuitive UI action. Plus it would be good for one-to-many relations (e.g. book > chapters or book > reviews), for which the multiple selection method outlined here wouldn't work.
However, adding an entry to a context-menu (that already exists) is a lot less intrusive. And frankly, I'm sure it can be implemented with less than 30 lines of Javascript code. In other words, I was hoping that this would even make it into 3.0 final.
Cheers, Matthias
The advantage of drag&drop is that it mirrors tag functionality and doesn't contribute to GUI (or rather - context menu) cluttering. I think it's strongly preferable.
Implementing it via a plugin in the first instance as ajlyon suggests probably makes sense; it would given you the freedom to try out different approaches to find an interface that covers the cases.
https://github.com/willsALMANJ/Zutilo
Can you undo a merge? I am new and I merged some things accidentally. Also the ability to copy tags across multiple items would be amazing.
Ex: I have 10 items of the same subject. I want to use tags rather than just a folder. I'd be able to highlight all items and then update tags.
I am not sure about undoing a merge -- I never use the merge command.