Settings
Zotero → Settings → zotLook.
Shortcuts
Each action has one shortcut. Click the field, press the combination, and it takes effect immediately — no restart.
The pane warns beneath the row concerned when a combination is already taken, checking the main window’s own keys, Zotero’s configurable shortcuts, and zotLook’s other actions. The warning is not confined to the moment of recording: it is still there the next time you open the settings, since a collision that already exists would otherwise be invisible.
This is not cosmetic. If two zotLook actions carry the same combination, one of them wins and the other never fires.
It warns rather than refuses, deliberately. Zotero publishes no list of other plugins’ shortcuts, and the operating system publishes none at all. A clean result therefore means no conflict with Zotero — not free.
Restore defaults writes the shipped combinations back:
| Action | Default |
|---|---|
| Preview | Space |
| Notes | Shift+Space |
| Contact sheet | Ctrl+Shift+Space |
| Contact sheet in a window | Ctrl+Alt+Space |
Combinations that never arrive
When the operating system or another application claims a combination, it takes it before Zotero sees the keys. There is then nothing to detect: the keystroke never arrives, and no list could be consulted for it — macOS gives up only its own symbolic shortcuts, as undocumented numeric ids, with nothing at all about what other programs have claimed, and Windows offers no query for RegisterHotKey whatsoever.
That absence is itself a finding, though. Press such a combination while recording and the modifier keys do arrive — they are ordinary key events — but the key between them does not. Let go without anything having arrived and the pane tells you so, rather than sitting on “press keys…” indefinitely. Choose a different combination.
Arrow keys in the preview
Linux only, and only there does the pane show it. GNOME’s preview keeps the arrow keys to itself and reports each press as selection movement — that is how Files walks its file list with the preview open. Arrow keys in the preview walk the item list (default on) makes zotLook answer the same way: an arrow in the preview moves the selection in your item list and the preview follows once the keys come to rest. Switched off, arrows in the preview do nothing — they cannot scroll it either way, since the preview never lets them through to the document.
Scrolling inside the preview is the wheel’s job; the Page keys join in after a click into the preview window, which is what hands its content the keyboard focus.
Which attachment is previewed
Two modes:
- By type — a ranking you arrange yourself: PDF, EPUB, HTML, image, video, anything else. Drag an entry up or down with the buttons beside the list. It is a ranking rather than a filter, so nothing is ever excluded; the order only decides who wins when an item has several attachments.
- First attachment — whatever the item lists first, regardless of type.
The contact sheet
Columns (default 5) decides the width of the grid. Fewer columns means larger thumbnails, and the renderer raises the resolution to match, so they stay sharp rather than being blown up.
Limit to at most … pages (default 0, meaning no limit) caps how many pages are rendered. It exists for unusually large scans, to bound how long generation may take and how much temporary disk space it may use. When it bites, the sheet says so at the bottom.
Columns and the page limit apply to PDFs. A book’s page overview is laid out by the window it is shown in — as many tiles per row as fit — and nothing is rendered, so neither setting has anything to act on.
Show the contents button and Show the annotations button (both on by default) put a button in each corner of the sheet: the document’s contents, read from the PDF’s outline, and its annotations, each entry a jump to its page. Off, the sheet is the grid alone. Unlike the two settings above, these apply to the page overview of a book as well.
Kept previews
The things zotLook makes cost seconds to make: the contact sheet, which draws every page of a book; the EPUB preview, which unpacks the book and reassembles it as one page; and a book’s page overview, which cuts that assembly at its printed page marks. All of them are kept and shown again.
Keep converted previews and show them again (default on) does that. What was made once is shown unchanged until something that would make it the wrong answer has changed — the file itself, its annotations, or the settings that shape it, such as the contact sheet’s column count.
Kept previews live in the profile’s cache area rather than in your Zotero library, so they are not backed up with it. The system’s temporary area, the obvious place for them, is the one place they cannot be: Zotero clears its own temporary directory completely at every shutdown, and a preview kept there never survived a restart. Switch it off if you would rather have the space: everything is then made afresh on every call and nothing outlives the session.
The folder is called zotLook-cache and sits in the Zotero profile inside the cache directory the system sets aside for this — under AppData\Local on Windows, ~/Library/Caches on macOS, and ~/.cache/zotero/zotero/<profile> on Linux. That is deliberate: anything that clears caches reaches it, and you may delete the folder yourself while Zotero is closed. It costs no more than making the previews again.
Drop previews unused for (default 30 days) clears up without your having to think about it. It counts from the last use rather than from when the preview was made: a book you open every week stays, one you looked at once in March goes. The check runs when Zotero starts rather than while you work — a preview vanishing mid-session would be more confusing than the space it occupied. A 0 switches it off, and they then stay until you delete them yourself.
Delete kept previews throws them all away at once. Beside it stands what they currently occupy — without that figure, pressing it would be a guess. After the deletion it reads zero, and the next call makes them afresh.
The annotated copy of a PDF is made the same way but deliberately not kept: it is a whole copy of the document, the largest thing here for the smallest saving, since exporting it takes a moment where a contact sheet takes seconds. It lives for the session and goes with the working directory at the next start.
Annotations
Zotero keeps annotations in its database rather than in the file, so a preview of the stored document would show it unmarked. There is a switch per format, both on by default, because the work behind them differs.
Draw them into PDF previews and contact sheets hands the work to Zotero: it writes a copy with your highlights, notes, areas and ink drawn on the page, and that copy is previewed. It costs a copy of the document, which is why it is worth being able to switch off on its own.
Mark them in EPUB previews costs nothing worth naming, since the page is being assembled anyway. There is no export for an EPUB, so zotLook reads the position Zotero stored — an EPUB CFI, which names the chapter, the element and the exact characters — and marks the page it builds accordingly: highlights filled in their own colour, underlines drawn as underlines. A button in the corner of the preview opens a list of every annotation in reading order — each quotation marked as it is marked in the book, so an entry is recognisable at a glance — with its comment; clicking an entry takes you to the passage. That is where notes live, which have no passage of their own, and any position that no longer resolves because the book itself has changed since.
Turn one off to preview that format as it is stored. Attachments that carry no annotations are recognised before any work starts either way, so the settings only matter for documents you have actually marked up.
EPUB
Render EPUB with zotLook is on by default, because no system preview shows an EPUB on its own.
If you would rather use a preview extension of the operating system than the one built into zotLook, switch zotLook’s EPUB preview off here — the book then goes to the panel untouched, like any other file. With no such extension installed, EPUB attachments then have no preview at all.