Drag & drop deficient (Zotero Standalone on Linux)

Drag & drop deficient (Zotero Standalone on Linux)

I know that external drag & drop has problems under Linux (see https://www.zotero.org/support/known_issues) but I've them with the internal one, too. In general, it works but is cumbersome and painfully slow -- I'll have to wait 3-4 seconds before the dragged items become visible and I can finally drop them. In fact, the delay between starting the drag and finally seeing the items being dragged around is such that I only recently realized that drag & drop works at all in Zotero. Even now, after some practice, by the time the items become visible I've usually moved them out of Zotero already and must turn back, making a slow near-circle on the screen. As for the drop, it is usually inaccurate enough to require multiple trials before dropping the load into the desired collection succeeds

I suggest the following. For usability and accessibility, there should be at least one alternative to drag & drop at least in moving items between collections (e.g. buttons, keys or a mouse menu). Zotero's a fine piece of software and it would be a shame if a deficiency in such a basic feature as moving items around would force one to workarounds like using browsers for moving them on www.zotero.org and then syncing (which is what I did before realizing that internal drag & drop actually works)
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Zotero Standalone 4.0.20
Libreoffice 4.2.4.2 (w/ JRE)
Linux Mint 13 Xfce (LTS, updated)
Chromium 34.0.1847.116 (w/ Zotero connector 4.0.8.2)
  • This isn't normal behavior, obviously.

    1) How many items are you trying to drag?

    2) What's your Quick Copy setting set to in the Search pane of the prefs? Does changing it to a different type (bib vs. export) make a difference?

    3) Moving/copying items via the context menu is planned.
  • 1) few (1-9)

    2) there are no qc settings in pref-s > search. i suppose you meant pref-s > export. by changing the default output format from "animal cognition" to "bibtex" made the delay significantly shorter (now about 1 second)

    3) splendid news

    in fact, not only drag & drop but also selecting items in the middle pane is very slow. i suppose it has sth to do w/ the number of references in my main collection (673). thanks and let me know if you have any other ideas to try out and/or speed things up
  • i suppose it has sth to do w/ the number of references in my main collection (673)
    No, 673 is small. There shouldn't be any slowdowns in a library that size.

    Can you provide a Debug ID for a drag set to BibTeX and another for a drag set to Animal Cognition? Is it the same for other styles, or is that one slower?

    As a temporary workaround, if you don't need Quick Copy you could set "Disable Quick Copy when dragging more than [x] items" to 0.
  • Also, if you have any add-ons (except for the LO add-on) installed in Zotero, disable those. Even if that doesn't help, keep them disabled while you troubleshoot.
  • Dan, all the styles I tested seem to have (about) the same slow speed. When I set "Disable Quick Copy.." to 0, there were no delays in dragging even w/ Animal Cognition. There was a gradation from fastest to slowest (for those that I tested): Simple Evernote Export,BibTex,RIS > TEI > styles. Also, the number of selected items seemingly played a role (the more the slower). Debug IDs (for the set of 8 items): BibTex: D624765068, D1686227511, AC: D1587424289, D1904412687 (2 drags for both, all 4 more or less identical)

    adamsmith, I don't have any extra add-ons
  • Dan: In case it's relevant, citeproc-js can be run from locale and style input expressed in JSON, which makes it possible to run the processor in an async worker thread. The kit for setting it up (an XML-to-JSON conversion script [in Python, but it's a tiny thing that could be recast in JS] and a JSON parsing module [implementing the same commands as xmldom.js]) are in the source archive.
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