PDF reader: Undo support #2051
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I understand this is specific to the PDF reader, but I think a generalized undo/redo feature would be extremely useful. I frequently have accidentally modified a record, or erroneously drag'n'dropped a PDF to another record, but was unable to undo. I am not sure whether I should make a separate issue (or if there is much utility in doing so). However, I just wanted to flag this as an important possible feature :) |
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Even though annotation saving is debounced and there are some other asynchronous tasks before annotation is finally saved as Zotero item, I think we should still try to explore a general undo mechanism first. I'm wondering if this would work for notes as well, because we also don't have a shared undo stack between note instances, and even for the same note if you select another note and then go back to the first one, it loses the undo stack. @dstillman I would like to try out that branch. |
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Should I try to implement a temporary and limited undo solution for the last action only, until we implement a more general undo/redo? |
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So I assume we'd clear the history when switching to another tab, which is easy, but I think we'd also want to clear when editing the item or creating/editing/deleting a note in the context pane. That seems a little harder, but if we can do that, I think we could do this — it's mostly a few actions within the reader that people have been asking for undo for. |
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But why do we want to clear the history? |
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Because otherwise you would perform some action elsewhere — e.g., editing an item field — but Undo would still be for the thing you did in the PDF reader rather than the last action you actually performed. If we can't undo the last action you actually performed, Undo should be disabled. But maybe rather than clearing when switching tabs, which is a little weird, or watching for specific actions in the context pane, which is complicated, we could just watch for certain global Notifier events? Basically, any |
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Well, that doesn't totally work, because sync and other things can trigger those. So maybe we need to mark notifier events as being background actions when they come from things like sync… |
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Unless you can think of a simpler option here, I'd hold off on this, and maybe we can work towards categorizing notifier events if we think that will be the best solution. |
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Generalized undo functionality is a deliverable for the RAMP project, but even partial implementation would be good to show progress here. |
We probably want a more generalized undo solution that we can hook into for this, and that's a larger technical design question, but there are a few operations in the PDF reader where undoing would be particularly useful, such as creating and deleting annotations.
I think I have a branch somewhere where I've started playing with generalized undo/redo, so let's discuss before we do any work on this. (We could consider doing one-off implementations, but that might set up the expectation that undo/redo would work more generally, or with multiple history levels.)
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