Zotero 8 Search showing all annotations in the items list

erichuntington
Thank everyone for all the hard work creating the wonderful update, Zotero 8. However, I have noticed a problem with the default search now displaying annotations in the items list, and I would appreciate any help that can be offered.

I often have hundreds of annotations in documents, and when the search (for all fields and tags) returns a result, it seems to show all the annotations in a document, even if they have nothing to do with a search term. These changes have made it impossible to quickly scan through a list of documents (or even annotations) that relate to the search term, because the results are filled with clutter. My solution for now is simply to click the disclosure triangle next to each PDF to hide the annotations, but I have to manually do this for each document returned in the search.

Can you suggest a fix? Or can the next version of Zotero be updated to not display annotations that are unrelated to the search term? Or to provide a preferences toggle so the user can choose a preferred behavior? Thank you very much.
  • mjthoraval
    My solution for now is simply to click the disclosure triangle next to each PDF to hide the annotations, but I have to manually do this for each document returned in the search.
    You can click on one item in the list and then press the - key to collapse all the attachments and annotations.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/keyboard_shortcuts#other_shortcuts

    But the devs have said that:
    in an upcoming version we plan to provide a way to hide the gray context rows when performing searches
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/504672/#Comment_504672
  • erichuntington
    Thank you very much for your prompt and helpful reply! Your suggestion will certainly make things easier for now, and I will look forward to the implementation of hiding greyed-out rows in the future.
  • alex.mitrani
    I second this suggestion - unfortunately hundreds of notes make it much harder to look through search results. It would be good if there was an option in preferences to control whether notes are displayed in search results or just the main container item for each document - I would prefer the latter.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    You can always use Title, Creator, Year mode if you only want to match top-level items.
  • alex.mitrani
    Right - thanks for reminding me, that's very helpful.
  • rigilkent
    I also second this suggestion. The amount of annotations the list is trying to display makes my Zotero 8 unresponsive after each search for a good moment, before I can press `ctrl+A` and `-` to collapse everything. It would be great to have the option to not display annotations when doing a search.
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