A button is highly unlikely to happen. There's just not enough UI space for a relatively little-used function that's already possible another way.

no space? seems to be a lot of it here: http://i.imgur.com/Mw6dm.jpg

or the the new items buttons (manual, by doi, by page) could be combined to one menu. personally I rarely use these - I use the icon in the location bar, and the citation is downloaded.

or as user verity suggests, something in the context menu

so basically my feature request is invalid ?

maybe the context menu is packed because it is duplicating some functionality of the toolbar (eg add attachment)

ok, if there's no space, then here's another feature request: customizable toolbar. one could easily pick and choose the most useful buttons, problem solved

For a few reasons: I didn't learn about the keyboard shortcut until stumbling upon it in the forums, so a button or context item would help new users who don't know about it. (It's not mentioned in the list of programmable shortcut keys under options.)

Using the keyboard is annoying, particularly when just about everything else can be done with the mouse. The two-key combination for (+), even more so.

Also, as mentioned, it's something I would use a lot more than some of the add item buttons, so it just seems bizarre to have a lot of ways to do things I don't need, and a hard way to do something I would use a lot.

I understand it probably won't get any attention. But it is still a feature request. I've never written any FF extensions, but wouldn't the fact that FF has customizable toolbars make that an easy thing to implement?

I will voice my support for this request as well.

If you want to avoid cluttering the GUI, how about a toggle in the preferences window to collapse all or expand all by default?

My biggest reason for wanting this is for search results. I would much prefer for search results to be collapsed by default, so I can more easily see all entries that include my search text in the title/author, as opposed to fulltext. Here's an illustration of what I mean: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~kjamison/zoterename/#collapse

I tried adding such a feature to a Zotero addon I wrote a while back (at the link above), but it was a bit of a hack and seems to raise Firefox warnings from time to time.

Any possibility of adding this simple preference?

I realize that, but it still adds visual clutter and makes it hard to quickly scan the results to find articles that only contain the search terms in the title/author, which is my most common usage scenario. IE, in the bottom image in the link I provided, it is really easy to quickly jump to all articles by the author I searched for, whereas in the first image it takes a little bit to visually sort through the others that just contain references to his papers.

EDIT: also thanks for the reply :)

That's good to know. And not to continue to be a pest, but just having an option to collapse search results by default would still be nice, because then you can do both search types, but visually parse out which results you want quite easily.

Thanks.

I only now discovered the +/-, but it took me ages to figure out it only works from the number pad, not from the main keyboard.

That's not the case. But you do need to make sure you're entering '+' and not '=' (i.e., holding Shift). If that's not working for you for some strange reason, though, that's an issue for another thread.

Here's another vote for the option to collapse search results by default.
And no, the - key is not an alternative, as I have to click into another part of the Zotero window to make it work.
To clarify this: When I'm entering a search term, I want to stop searching as soon as the search has narrowed down sufficiently, but if even one of the top items has several attachments (and in one of them the search is a hit), I won't be able to see the items below. In this case, I cannot just press '-', as this merely adds it to the search string. Instead, I have to click into the pane below, press '-' to collapse items, and then click back into the search field to continue typing my search string (to narrow down the results), however, this will instantly expand the nodes again. This is a stupid and counterintuitive behaviour.

If it was a real shortcut, it would at least work from within the search field. I don't think, for example, that Alt+'-' is taken (nor is Alt+'+').

The simplified search mode is something that has been promised for years now, but maybe it's time to listen to users and implement a quick solution rather than the complex one. Customizable shortcuts would be on the top list. Or customizable toolbars - as even on my tiny netbook, there is still space for at least ten more buttons.

Another solution would be to prioritize search results where the search string is found in the metadata and list them first - another often requested feature that would mirror the behaviour of just about any search engine on the web.

@Dan Stillman: Oh, sorry, I didn't know that. I guess that makes me a beta-tester from now on then. Thanks.