That's not currently possible, sorry. There's some chance we'll add support for this in the future.
(It used to be possible when Zotero was a Firefox extension, because you could open multiple Firefox windows, but it's never worked in the standalone Zotero app.)
@marialuiza1988 if your problem is that you are modifying an item, but need to look up another item in order to accomplish that, which means that you then have to go back and find your earlier item again... I have a workaround where I tag the item or items I'm working on with the tag ".NOW" and I have a saved search that finds all items with that tag. So I just switch between my main collection and the saved search, and remove the tag when I'm done with the item. Would that help?
+1, this would be a great help. Detachable panes would be even better. With several groups and many collections, it is getting harder and harder to navigate or organize references.
I am really struggling now so I thought I would return to this suggestion.
In large collections with multiple groups and many people making collections the current navigation becomes insufficient (painful). Moving references or comparing collections is hard and requires multiple expanding/collapsing and scrolling operations.
Multiple windows into the same database would help, especially if one could right-click a collection and choose: open in a new window.
The web library has become really good in recent years, so I suppose one solution is to open the web library at zotero.org/[yourusername]/items. As far as I understand you can have that open in multiple tabs. Of course they won't support dragging from one window to another but at least comparing collections, tags etc. should be fairly easy.
I have 31000 papers locally stored. Organising the important ones into sensible collections would be much easier if I had two Zotero windows to drag and drop between, like having two Finder/FileExplorer windows. Nonetheless, Zotero is great.
Bumping this! For the same reason - I have a huge library that trying to sort through for multiple projects (or creating a new shared project) would be SO much easier with two windows open.
Bumping this as well! Having multiple windows would make organising collections much easier.
One concrete issue this would solve is that often it is necessary to peek inside a sub-collection to decide if an item fits there or not, as the collection name often is not discriminative enough. However, currently that means the current view for the collection is lost in which the item lives at the moment. Thus once you did find the target collection for the item, you can not drag it over because you lost the view on the item itself.
Multiple collections in multiple tabs with drag and drop between tabs would help, too.
It appears what one says is "bumping". Yes, please. Love Zotero, use it hard, would appreciate effective user interface improvements for large libraries, on macOS.
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(It used to be possible when Zotero was a Firefox extension, because you could open multiple Firefox windows, but it's never worked in the standalone Zotero app.)
In large collections with multiple groups and many people making collections the current navigation becomes insufficient (painful). Moving references or comparing collections is hard and requires multiple expanding/collapsing and scrolling operations.
Multiple windows into the same database would help, especially if one could right-click a collection and choose: open in a new window.
Thanks for considering.
Thanks!
One concrete issue this would solve is that often it is necessary to peek inside a sub-collection to decide if an item fits there or not, as the collection name often is not discriminative enough. However, currently that means the current view for the collection is lost in which the item lives at the moment. Thus once you did find the target collection for the item, you can not drag it over because you lost the view on the item itself.
Multiple collections in multiple tabs with drag and drop between tabs would help, too.
Another feature also can do: a "move to" option when right-clicking on an item.