Google drive and reactivation issues; contextual menu request

[kirk86]

Hi, thanks for maintaining the app. The idea is pretty neat and usually can also be found in alfred workflows but I prefer this cause it is FOSS. Some things that might really enhance this app and make it more productive would be the integration with the spotlight (MacOS), instead of the user having to navigate and use the mouse to chose the show option to search the zotero collections it would be nice if it could be done from spotlight. For instance fire up spotlight and use qnotero:search title and then it would show up the results. Or just through spotlight fire qnotero that brings the search/show interface.

The other thing is that I keep my pdfs in gdrive and using the show interface it seems that I can't open the pdf.

Finally it would be nice if there was a right click menu or some kind of keybinding similar to quick copy found in zotero with the same flexibility as the one in zotero.

Thanks!

[ealbiter]

Hi @kirk86, thank you for your feedback.

For instance fire up spotlight and use qnotero:search title and then it would show up the results. Or just through spotlight fire qnotero that brings the search/show interface.

Honestly, I am a complete noob regarding macOS programming and it would we challenging to accomplish such level of integration with spotlight. But, as you pointed out, using spotlight to launch qnotero, when another instance of qnotero is running, should bring the running instance to the front; however this feature seems to be broken in the current implementation. I will look into that.

Finally it would be nice if there was a right click menu or some kind of keybinding similar to quick copy found in zotero with the same flexibility as the one in zotero.

I agree with you. Actually this is my next project to implement, and I thinking in the functionality to implement, and in the next days I will create the project here in GitHub with my ideas.

[kirk86]

@ealbiter Thanks for the prompt reply. Could you also have a look at why I can't open the pdf file. If I can search and find what I'm looking opening the corresponding pdf should be since the url is in the .bib file describing all zotero collections

[ealbiter]

Of course. Can you describe your Zotero set-up?
As far as can see, you are not using the Zotero synchronization and you are using the google drive to sync your entire Zotero folder. Am I right?

_{Sent with GitHawk}

[kirk86]

@ealbiter Sure,

As far as can see, you are not using the Zotero synchronization and you are using the google drive to sync your entire Zotero folder. Am I right?

My zotero folder is in my home directory. I do use synchronization of the items using zotero's defaults system but I only synchronize the item entries itself (i.e. probably zotero behind the scenes keep the .zotero.sql updated across devices), not the pdfs. For the pdfs and the .bib file I keep them in google drive. Does that help? Let me know if you have any more questions.

I believe that zotero.sql somewhere contains info about the .bib file url. If you find that then everything is easy since every entry in .bib file has a corresponding file attribute with links to the pdfs

[ealbiter]

I made some tests but I can't replicate your bug. Could you please run qnotero from the terminal and paste here the output, after trying to open the file? Use this command (assuming Qnotero.app is in the Applications folder):

/Applications/Qnotero.app/Contents/MacOS/qnotero 

[kirk86]

This is what I get running qnotero from terminal

Using Python 3.7.4 (v3.7.4:e09359112e, Jul  8 2019, 14:54:52) 
[Clang 6.0 (clang-600.0.57)]
libqnotero._themes.light.__init__(): using '/Applications/Qnotero.app/Contents/MacOS/themes/light'
libzotero._noteProvider.gnoteProvider: failed to import Levenshtein
qnotero.reInit(): using GnoteProvider
libgnote.__init__(): failed to locate Gnote
libzotero.__init__(): zotero_path = b'/Users/jm/Zotero'
libzotero.update(): indexing completed in 0.317s
libzotero.search(): search for 'dummy' completed in 0.002s

Since I'm vnc'ed to my osx box running qnoteror from cli and then invoking the gui application to do the search of the pdf in order to see the debug output in the cli, it doesn't invoke the gui app, meanning that if I run the qnotero from terminal and the use spotlight to bring up qnotero gui -> show -> search for pdf, doesn't bring up the gui at all. It seems that I can only invoke the gui or the terminal but not starting qnotero up in terminal then using the gui in order to debug in therminal (at least as of speaking being vnc'ed to my box)