Upgrade Storagerequest: more available colored tags to enable using emojis beside the item title, among others
I guess one of the reasons that the developer team limit the number of colored tags to 9 is to avoid having too many tags beside the item title, which is difficult to distinguish according to the colors. However, if we assign the content of a colored tag to be an emoji, the colored square beside the title will be displayed as the emoji itself, which is quite easy to distingush from the rest of colored tags.
I found this method is quite convient, especially considering that I'm using a wide screen, allowing for the display of a lot of tags, but currently, one can only assign nine colored tags, which prevents the user from using more tags.
In my opinion, the improvement of the tagging system can make zotero much more powerful, this could include:
1. adding more colored tags or tags that can be assigned as emojs to be displayed beside the item title
2. hierachy tags, similar to what we have in, e.g., obsidian
3. shortcuts for tags besides the existing 9 colored tags, though this could be done via other existing plugins
4. make the autocomplete when typing tags not necessarily matching start the first character
5. It can be even more power if a tag searching pane can be provided, which accepts queries similar to those used in, e.g., google scholar or web of science, so that one can filter items with tags in a more advanced fashion; it can be even better if one can save these searches, which can be retrieved later. I know that this can be done with the current "saved searches", but the current approach is a bit inconvenient when handling complex queries; quite often, one has to create several "sub" saved searches, which will be used to create the final search.
I found this method is quite convient, especially considering that I'm using a wide screen, allowing for the display of a lot of tags, but currently, one can only assign nine colored tags, which prevents the user from using more tags.
In my opinion, the improvement of the tagging system can make zotero much more powerful, this could include:
1. adding more colored tags or tags that can be assigned as emojs to be displayed beside the item title
2. hierachy tags, similar to what we have in, e.g., obsidian
3. shortcuts for tags besides the existing 9 colored tags, though this could be done via other existing plugins
4. make the autocomplete when typing tags not necessarily matching start the first character
5. It can be even more power if a tag searching pane can be provided, which accepts queries similar to those used in, e.g., google scholar or web of science, so that one can filter items with tags in a more advanced fashion; it can be even better if one can save these searches, which can be retrieved later. I know that this can be done with the current "saved searches", but the current approach is a bit inconvenient when handling complex queries; quite often, one has to create several "sub" saved searches, which will be used to create the final search.
For example, if I have 40 references in a collection, I may want to put an emoji to all the ones that I have finished reading, or alternatively, put an emoji to all the ones that are related to a specific topic.
One potential use of such a function: if an emoji "indicating that I have finished reading this paper" is displayed in front of the item titles that I have finished reading, then it would be quite convient to tell "simply by looking at the items pane" which papers have been read and which ones are yet to be read, then I can continue reading those that haven't been read.
Except for the colored tags, there is no existing way to display items in the item pane that both with a specific tag or without that tag, while allowing the users to be able to distinguish them. That's why I believe that the colored tag, or more specifically, those tags that can be displayed in front of the item title, is particularlly useful, and more such tags are needed for my case. A larger number of tags that works in this way is thus convienient, especially if one can assign shortkeys to them too.
https://github.com/whacked/zotero-special-tags-column
In that plugin, you can select which tags are displayed in a "Special tags" column, in a similar way as the coloured tags.
The drawback of a column type display of tags is that it wastes a lot of space for all the items which do not have tags, as you need to scale the width of the column to the maximum width necessary for the item with the most tags. If you limit your tagging system to 1-3 tags per item, this is probably still a nice option, as you gain the full flexibility to choose which tags to display.
The plugin is functional and very nice, although with a few limitations to be careful with:
- Need to convert the special tags to ascii characters manually. I have used this page: http://www-db.deis.unibo.it/courses/TW/DOCS/w3schools/jsref/tryit.asp-filename=tryjsref_escape.html
- Need to re-enter the tags list and restart every time you want to add or edit a tag.
- Cannot order by the Special Tags column to see which items have special tags: this will generate an error. To recover, you will need to restart, disable the plugin, sort by another column, enable the plugin and restart.
1. it would be great if one can assign the order of the emoji tags in, e.g. a setting pane;
2. it would be convenient if shortcuts can be set to them. Moreover, text can follow the emoji in the same tag so that it's simpler for the user to remember the meaning of the emoji.