Citations Pane near Plots and Packages?

[colerehbein]

Hi all, first time contributing to the community.

I'm wondering if there's a way to show all the citations that have been referred to in a .qmd or .rmd document in its own pane, similar to the "Files," "Plots," or "Packages" panes. It would not render the whole .bib file, only references currently in the document. I used Zettlr for several projects and enjoyed this feature as a way to preview my references section. I'm wondering if this has been implemented or if it would be easy or feasible to do so. Please let me know what steps should be taken and how I might be able to help implement.

Thank you!!

[technocrat]

The internals of RStudio are a heady mix of Java, Javascript, Electron and I'm not sure what else. As far as I can tell there is no user option to make this happen other than tweaking the codebase and there is a still open, long-running debate over how best to use the available screen real estate. What I do when working in that mode is to render to html for viewing in a browser tab, since it's usually too big to fit in the viewer pane, and move to the section I need to refer to. On the laptop I have to tab cycle through windows, but on an external monitor there's enough room to side by side.

[colerehbein]

Thank you for your reply! I'm not competent to tackle developing in any of those languages at this time, I assumed of course that the guts are above my head but wanted to offer help anyway. Thank you also for sharing your workflow.

Best,
Cole

[technocrat]

You and me both. I occasionally have to pop the hood of the source on github and count myself lucky if there's much I can recognize.

[cderv]

@colerehbein there is some feature regarding citations in the Visual editor inside RStudio IDE
See Visual R Markdown - Citations or Quarto - Technical Writing

I don't know if this is a bit helpful compated to Zettlr, but you can definitely open a feature request in GitHub - rstudio/rstudio: RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R with your ideas !

Thank you

[colerehbein]

Thank you for your reply and the links to the documentation.

I'm now understanding better how the tab system for the panes is a compromise between including features/views and maximizing available screen real estate. I naively thought that this tab system was more highly extensible by the user, and it would be simple to add an additional "references" tab to the "environment" pane.

I'll open a feature request. After looking into it I don't think there is a way to view the currently referenced citations in a document in a single view, either as a pane or different window.

It might be nice to have the references as a view like the "outline" on the visual editor instead of as its own pane. Since the "outline" feature seems to be continually parsing the document for markdown headers, it might be able to be adjusted to parse for citations.

The way RStudio does citations works excellently for me, I've found it easier and more comprehensive than Zettlr. So it's more helpful in many others ways This is just a little extra feature I was searching for and I appreciate y'alls prompt response.

In the meantime a simpler workaround that I could competently tackle might be to write a script that looks for the citations in the document and saves them in a data frame that gets displayed separately, that auto-updates, etc.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!

Cole