zotero --help should explicitly mention "--url"

[rdiaz02]

Right now, zotero --help (at least under linux systems) does not show --url as a command line flag and the "Usage" section might give the impression that a URL passed at the end will be taken as such, which it won't unless preceeded by --url. The only way to find out how to pass the url seems to be looking at the code (thus making it hard to realize how trivial it is to use zotero://select).

[twi001]

I find the option --url zotero://select/... extremely helpful for Zotero integration in note taking systems such as the zettelkasten concept allowing direct links into Zotero. Before, I had tried zotero URL as described in the zotero --help, but gave up after some time since it didn't work. Just by chance I found a post discussing the --url option and the format for zotero://select/.... An update of the cli help would be very helpful!

[dstillman]

--help isn't something that comes from us — that's just from the Firefox binary that Zotero uses. If we change how Zotero is built, we might be able to customize that, but for now I'm closing this as WONTFIX.

But you don't need to use --url to use zotero://select — you just need to associate Zotero with zotero:// URLs on your system. That happens automatically on macOS and Windows, but how you do that on Linux depends on your distro. It looks like the zotero-deb packages use a desktop file that registers itself for the zotero scheme. Assuming that works, we'll look into adding that to the zotero.desktop file in the official tarball.

[rdiaz02]

Thanks for the details.

In case it helps other Linux users: Indeed what I have been doing for several years now (I use Debian) is to create a desktop file, zotero.desktop, which lives under $HOME/.local/share/applications. In the mimeapps.list file (under $HOME/.local/share/applications) I have this line x-scheme-handler/zotero=zotero.desktop.

My zotero.desktop is a link to a script I wrote for my specific way of working that will either call the zotero binary when one passes something like zotero://select/items (I still use --url) or my chosen PDF viewer (Emacs in my case) when called as zotero://open-pdf/.

So, when I call from the shell (or any other application that uses xdg) something like xdg-open zotero://select/items/whatever zotero will open that entry, and when I do xdg-open zotero://open-pdf/0_whatever/pagenumber the whatever PDF is opened at that pagenumber.