Upgrade Storage[Feature request] Improved tab navigation: Tab search, tab grouping, cycle last used tab
Often when writing and needing to cite many papers, or when working on multiple projects that cite papers in disparate fields, Zotero can become a bit unwieldy because it becomes difficult to navigate through opened articles efficiently. One just has to be able to recognize the first few words of a title to get to the article one is looking for, and it often involves scrolling quite far in the tabs left or right. Of course, one can always "re-open" the article one is looking for from the library, but this is not particularly efficient, especially when one needs to flip back and forth between articles which aren't in adjacent tabs.
One way Zotero could improve this navigation is through tab search and tab grouping, as Google Chrome has introduced (somewhat) recently. Tab grouping would help to organize opened articles when a user is working on multiple disparate projects at once, and tab search, especially if it can include authors, would be extremely helpful for when there are > 10 articles open at once.
Another handy tool I've found when browsing is introducing a keyboard shortcut that can cycle through the last viewed tabs (similar to window switching using Alt+Tab on Windows, but just for tabs). It is implemented extremely well here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clut-cycle-last-used-tabs/cobieddmkhhnbeldhncnfcgcaccmehgn?pli=1 and I use it daily.
One way Zotero could improve this navigation is through tab search and tab grouping, as Google Chrome has introduced (somewhat) recently. Tab grouping would help to organize opened articles when a user is working on multiple disparate projects at once, and tab search, especially if it can include authors, would be extremely helpful for when there are > 10 articles open at once.
Another handy tool I've found when browsing is introducing a keyboard shortcut that can cycle through the last viewed tabs (similar to window switching using Alt+Tab on Windows, but just for tabs). It is implemented extremely well here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clut-cycle-last-used-tabs/cobieddmkhhnbeldhncnfcgcaccmehgn?pli=1 and I use it daily.
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-7/#tabs-menu
Also, veritical tabs in a sidebar would be an incredible option (that's also how I use Firefox).
If you open two paper from the same collection it could default to putting them in the same tab group. Since papers are generally in multiple collections I specifically mean that it should depend on from where you click on the paper. So if you open a collection and then open the paper it is assigned to the tab group corresponding to that collection. If you open the same paper from the general library it is not assigned a tab group and you can move it into one yourself. Generally I would suggest tab groups at the level of collections (not sub-collections) because that is how I structure my projects but maybe that needs to be configurable if other people do that differently.
This would very often guess the correct project for me and reduce the manual organization needed greatly.
(Similar thread here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/124150/tab-groups-feature-request)
Also, I know they are already planned to be included (per this: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/125819/suggestion-tab-folders-groups-similar-to-firefox/p1), but I was hoping to see them in 8 – and they are still not there... And it would be brilliant if one could group, say, 3 different translations of a book or several thematically linked articles.
Edit: On second thought, an added option for vertical tabbing (mentioned above, a long-time Vivaldi user here) – in the immortal words of Chandler Bing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-k84sNe08) – would be perfection!
Tab grouping and also the capability to assign a colour to the tab (or the group) would be very useful
To the extent that it works, it covers my personal use cases reasonably well, but surely can be improved and hopefully eventually supplanted by native support.