Suggestion: Let each article tab open in Zotero show both title and author

eliashln
At the moment I have about 15 tabs of different articles open in Zotero, each one showing the first word of its interrupted, such as "Uncertaint...", "Assessme...", "Applicatio..." and nothing else. When I quickly want to go to an article I may not remember the title, but I usually remember the author. It would be helpful if this was instead shown:

"Uncertaint..." , "Assessme...", "Applicatio..."
"Harrison" , "Doobledor...", "Firez"
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    I'm not sure what you mean by that. It's truncated because there's no room to show more, so we can't somehow show the author too. You can hover over the tab to see the full string. If you prefer to see the author first, you can change that from the General pane of the Zotero preferences.

    Zotero 7 will add a menu that shows open tabs in a wider list and allows you to search them.
  • eliashln
    In my example the commas serves as separators indicating different tabs. I'll explain in another way. My idea would require you to add a new row in the tab, making it higher, like so:

    "Title"
    "Author"

    Both could get truncated independently of each other.

    Hovering is not really time efficient when you have 15 tabs open. It is good that you can choose to show author instead, although both title and author would imo be even more helpful to quickly identify which article you want to swap to.

  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited August 1, 2023
    I don't see us making the tabs taller — that would look bizarre and take up too much vertical space. (I also don't know of any other tab system that works that way, though I guess one could make the argument that most programs with tabs don't have multiple metadata fields to show.)

    Again, though, in Zotero 7 there'll be a menu that you can use to view much longer strings and search. We also may be able to do what Chrome does and use a custom tooltip implementation that keeps the tooltip open as you move between tabs.
  • eliashln
    Well whatever text you choose to expand will take up more space, the question is what is most helpful to expand on. And most programs that use tabs are web browsers afaik, and the name of the website is the only info you need there.

    I'd encourage any way to help a user navigate lots of articles though, so let's see how Zotero 7 turns out.
Sign In or Register to comment.