[Suggestion] Make delete key behavior consistent between Saved Searches and My Library

edited February 11, 2017
When I am in My Library or any of its subcollections that I have created (folder icon in the side pane), I can delete the item by navigating to it with the arrow keys and then pressing the delete key. I can also delete subitems by expanding an item, navigating to the subitem and press the delete key.

In the "Duplicate Items" and the "Unfiled Items" automade collections, I cannot delete any items or subitems by pressing the delete key.

In the "Trash" automade collection, I can use the delete key to remove subitems, but not items.

The expected behavior is that the delete key can be used to remove any type of item or subitem that is currently highlighted regardless of which collection the item is in.
  • pressing delete anywhere other than "My Library" removes the item from the collection (so the behavior is actually not the same in My Library and in Collections).
    That doesn't make sense for saved searches like Unfiled or Duplicate (or any other saved searches that update automatically) which is why it's not possible there.
    My guess is that in the trash the parent items you looked at weren't actually trashed but just displayed for context.

    None of this has changed, afaict, from Zotero 4
  • Yes, you are right regarding the trash, the parent item is actually greyed out also, I just didn't notice it the first time around. And the collections do indeed behave differently than "My Library". This means that for "My Library" and its collections, the delete key behavior is consistent with the first delete option in the right click menu (which is "Move Item to Trash" and "Remove Item from Collection", respectively).

    I think it does makes sense for saved searches to share the delete key behavior of "My Library". The items already have a right click option to "Move Item to Trash", so I would argue that it is more intuitive for them to also have that action linked to the delete key. Especially for the duplicates this would be helpful, since the reason one views them is often to find redundant entries to delete.

    I updated the topic since this does not only apply to the Beta version.
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