Spending more time recently working with Tropy, I noticed two minor details which I find a bit cumbersome and maybe could be considered to be changed in the future:
When merging items in Project view, the newly merged item isn’t in the center of my window anymore, but further up, so after merging a larger number of items, I have to scroll up again to center the item and to continue viewing my material at the last position. The smaller my screen and the more items I merged, the more I have to scroll up to come back to my last position.
The second detail is the autocompletion of tags: When adding tags to an item, in most of the time I’m adding already existing tags. When I start typing a drop-down list of matching tags appears, which is great, but I always have to click down to select the existing tag and then confirm it with enter. The suggestion would be, that if there is only one matching tag, it can be selected by just typing enter. That way, typing some (mostly 1-3) letters and pressing enter would be enough for adding an existing tag. At the moment you have to type 1-3 letters, press down and confirm with enter. I know, it would save just one click and isn’t a big deal, but when I’m adding multiple tags, it would make things a bit faster.
As I said, just two minor, not very important details for this great software. If there are reasons for the existing behavior I just didn’t see, ignore my feedback. Thanks!
Thanks! We’ll try to address the first point in the upcoming release.
For the second one, we haven’t really been able to find a satisfying solution. The reason we can’t just pick the only (or first) suggestion on enter is that the tag adder widget can also be used to add new tags. Therefore, enter will submit the exact contents of the input field at that moment – otherwise it would be impossible to add a new tag that is the substring of an existing one.
By the way, for adding multiple tags more quickly there’s also a shortcut built into the tag adder: if you enter a list of tags, separated by commas, and you confirm with the combination of Shift+Enter, Tropy will split the list and add each tag separately. That could be helpful if you want to add the same list of tags frequently .
Thanks for the answer, I’m looking forward to the next release.
I didn’t know about the shortcut for adding lists of tags, I will try this out.
According the autocompletion, my thought was (without knowing if this would cause other problems) if it would be possible to implement a similar behavior like autocompletion in some text editors: After typing the first letter you get a list of suggestions and hitting enter will accept the first suggestion, while hitting Esc will deny all suggestions and hitting now enter will accept exactly what you typed as a new tag. In my workflow I add way more often an existing tag then creating a new tag, so hitting Esc in the latter case would happen way less often than hitting down to select an existing tag. I stumbled upon the behavior, because I’m used to the described behavior from other software and what happens to me once in a while is, that I hit enter to early, because the tag I want to add already appeared in the list with the result of accidentally adding half a word as a new tag which I then have to delete again.
But as I said, no big deal, just a quick thought.