Loss of tag checkbox pane

[voltaic]

There was a usability regression around version 1.1.5. At one time referencer had an additional pane on the left hand side that displayed all tags as checkboxes. This made it very easy to apply tags to one or more references with a single click. Now the only way to tag a reference is to right click on it and then select from a list of available tags. This has to be done each time a tag is applied and becomes tedious very quickly, especially when a reference needs to be tagged with several tags all at once.

The issue was originally reported by Henry Gomersall on the mailing list back in 2009. See the email here: http://icculus.org/pipermail/referencer/2009-May/000485.html

Attached is a screenshot from referencer version 1.1.0 which shows the feature in use. I pulled the screenshot from the referencer homepage. I am not clear on why this feature was removed in the first place.

[Mads Chr. Olesen (shiyee)]

I have noticed the same problem. I have thought about implementing a new document tagging dialog for quickly editing a document's tags. Would this seem reasonable to you?

[voltaic (voltaic)]

A separate dialog would work, but I think that might make it cumbersome to edit tags quickly. To make tag editing effective we would need to allow for the selection of multiple items and tagging them together.

Consider the following scenario: The user has 25 items that are tagged with Tag X and wants to tag all of those items with Tag Y. Right now we have to process each item one at a time. Can we make it possible for the user to select those 25 items and tag them together in a single step?

Here are some possibilities:

There could be a separate tag editing pane that the user can show or hide and it would go on the right-hand-side of the screen. So the user would select Tag X on the left-hand pane, select the items of interest from the list, and then place a check mark next to Tag Y on the right-hand pane. I also think having an extra vertical pane would be smart because widescreen resolution are very common now: screens have a lot of horizontal pixels, but not many vertical pixels.

Another option would be to have a "tag editing mode" button. The button would toggle between tag selection (the way the Tag Pane works now) and a tag editing mode (check boxes are shown next to each tag). Again, the user could make a selection of items and then hit the "tag edit" button, which would change the Tag Pane into a list of checkboxes, and then edit the tags as needed.

I hope these suggestions help. And thank you for taking over the project and continuing its development.

[voltaic (voltaic)]

I apologize if it seems like I'm abusing the comments box, but I have another thought. A very nice way of tagging items would be to allow dragging-and-dropping of entries onto the Tag Pane on the left. Of course, this does not handle untagging.