feature request: partial tag completion

fschuman
Tagging an item currently supports auto completion. Typing a string lists all the tags starting with the string in a context menu.

Suggestions for partial strings would be very useful in addition.

i.e. if typing "item" would not only find "item [post string]" but also "[pre string] item [post string]".
  • realtime99
    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.
  • fschuman
    Could I nudge a little about partial-tag completion ? It would help tremendously to create and maintain a consistent tagging system.

  • fschuman
    Adding another nudge... partial tag completion would help using tags with more consistency.
  • adamsmith
    My understanding (I believe dstillman commented on this in a different thread) is that partial tag completion is massively more demanding in terms of computation, so getting this to work in a way that's reasonably fast enough for a good user experience is, at a minimum, not trivial, so this isn't a simple request.
  • fschuman
    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.
  • tim820
    edited February 2, 2024
    It would also facilitate a useful 'lite' version of nested tags, ie a single tag with the name 'parent_tag->child_tag'.
    So when typing child_tag into the tag box, the nested tag 'parent_tag->child_tag' would be amongst the matching suggestions.
  • fschuman
    edited February 3, 2024
    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 ?
  • adamsmith
    search boxes and auto-complete aren't the same thing. It's OK when search while you type has, say, as 5 second lag. That's not (I, and I assume the devs, would think) acceptable for auto-complete, which needs to be essentially lagless.
  • fschuman
    edited February 4, 2024
    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!
  • iagogv
    edited 16 days ago
    +1 to this.

    I was going to start a new discussion for completion of tags "not beginning with", as I have many tags structured in the way of @tim820 comment https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/454096/#Comment_454096 (for example "R-package:[package name]"), but fortunately I found this one.

    This should be feasible (at least more than some years ago) with current tools. I do not understand the difference commented by @adamsmith in https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/454291/#Comment_454291, but maybe some lag would be acceptable when tag completion does not have any suggestion for tags beginning with completed part.

    An option could be also allowing us to set a collection of strings to search tags beginning with them (for example, for my use given in the first paragraph, I would set the string "R-package:", so tags completion would look for tags starting with completed part or with "R-project:" + completed part)

    WDYT @dstillman?

    Thanks!
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