Feature suggestion suggestion for renaming tags

Because I allow automatic tagging when adding items, tag names with slight variations accumulate. Every now and then I do some housecleaning on that, which comes down to merging tags.
Currently, the only way to do that is to rename the tag with the name you don't want and replace it with the name that you do want. This probably works fine for most people =). However, because I am slightly lysdexic, I use a lot of emojis in my tags (they're easier to recognise than words). The problem is, of course, that it's not so straightforward to type them on your keyboard.
What I do now is edit the tag with the name I want including emoji, copy that, cancel, go to the tag with the unwanted name, edit, paste, save. This is rather a bit of a hassle.
Now, if you add a tag to an item in your library, it suggests the tags existing in your library - including the emoji, yay.
It would be so lovely if this same feature existed in the rename tag dialogue box! Then I'd never have to go through the hassle to include the emojis, nor do I have to worry about whether my desired tag name is "Oxidative Stress" or "Oxidative stress" (I can stare at that for an eternity before I see the difference, you see =)
One might need a warning like "tag name already exist, are you sure you want to merge these tags?" or something.

Off topic: yes, my Zotero library is very colourful :D
  • It's not a bad idea, but I'm not 100% sure we want it. Merging tags is likely the exception when renaming, so most of the time this would likely just be distracting. If you were doing tag cleanup, I could certainly see it being useful, though…

    We can't do this in the current rename window for technical reasons anyway, but I've created an issue to track it, and we can think about whether it makes sense.
  • edited August 9, 2019
    Thanks for your super fast response and I am looking very much forward to a solution!

    If it can't be managed with ease in the rename feature... maybe I am not the only one who is pretty eager to see a tag management tool?

    It might include some other helpful things that are already available elsewhere. For instance, the report shows a number behind the tags of how many items in the report have that tag. When using the tag panel, you can select the tag, of course, and then see how many papers are tagged with that tag, so I can decide whether I want to keep that tag. If I then decide I want to merge that tag with another tag, however, I need to first go to the tag with the name I want, in order to edit and copy it, but as soon as you unselect the tag, you skip back to the top in the tag list. When you have hundreds of tags and you were cleaning up tags starting with an S, that's a lot of scrolling back, and back again, and back again.
    The shiny new tag management tool could show the number of items it is connected to right there in its window; it would have the option to select the tags "Multiple Sclerosis (MS)", "multiple sclerosis", "Multiple sclerosis", "Multiple sclerosis (MS)", "MS", "multiple-sclerosis", "neurodgenerative disorders/multiple sclerosis" all at once and let you pick which of all of those names you want to keep.
    It would be WONDERFUL! :D

    Edit: it could even have that title case option that aliakhavan89 suggested!
  • +1 to this, I manage a library with thousands of items and we use a controlled vocabulary taking the form of "Population: Adults" in order to have tags and appearance flow right. Between the various users about ~500 tags got autoadded that can only be removed one by one
  • +1 – frustrating that this issue has been ignored for more than 10 years now
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