This feature would be very useful for me as well. For my tags that are several similar words (e.g. story/narrative/fable) I often have trouble remembering which of the words is listed first.

Adding another nudge... partial tag completion would help using tags with more consistency.

Oh, I didn't realise. Is it not just something like doing a substring match over all tags ? Evernotes Webclipper does this for example, or when you add a link in Obsidian, LogSeq, Discord or apps like this, they show you a list of note titles in which the typed string is a substring.

Btw - both the "add note" and the 'add citation" search boxes for Word do this already. The list of items that shows up to select from contains all items that include the search string, not only the items that start with the search string.

Perhaps there's a misunderstanding of what the suggesting is, or perhaps I'm missing something in the technical implementation - but would doing this for tags (there are fewer and they are shorter than library items, I suppose) really be computationally demanding ?

That makes sense. I'm probably not seeing the complexity. Apologies for that.

Evernote indeed seems to have two different behaviours for this: the Webclipper lists the superstrings instantaneously 'as' you type with each keystroke; the Edit Tag menu waits for typing to pause for a small moment and updates the suggestion box then, I'd say this takes perhaps 100 or 200 ms. To me, the second works fine and adds a lot of value in keeping tags consistent.

But again, perhaps I'm just not seeing the complexity involved!

+1 feature request.

I am beginning to notice a theme here... Have had Zotero for a week and nearly every thing that annoys me I find a thread for. These are all features that are standard in other software, but have not yet been implemented in Zotero. I say not yet because they will certainly be implemented eventually. What we are asking for is priority. Posting about how something "can't" be done is counter-productive and unless you are a professional software developer, you don't actually know, its just rude to downplay a perfectly reasonable request that many people have over a long period of time.

@fschuman: The tag selector only has to be generated intermittently, when you switch collections, and the results can appear whenever they're ready. Autocomplete requires searching all tags in the library on every (debounced) keypress, and needs to show up quickly to be useful. A left-bound search is very fast because it uses a database index, whereas a non-left-bound search has to scan every single tag. You might not have enough tags in your library where that would be a performance problem, but some people have hundreds of thousands (and way more tags than they have items, which is why the citation dialog isn't relevant).

(Years ago, when this was first implemented, slow queries would also hang the UI, but that doesn't happen anymore.)

But as we've said elsewhere, computers have gotten a lot faster, to the point where it's more realistic to do this for everyone. We're still going to try to optimize it a bit more to keep it as fast as possible. We're working on that now and should have an update soon.