I’m terrible with a touchpad (and even worse with a touchscreen). Spurious clicks abound.
With Scrivener, this results in the accidental re-ordering of Binder items while doing editing (never happens during writing, for what are probably obvious reasons).
Normally this is only a minor incovenience. In a recent project with ~400 Binder leaves, I began using the Document Notes to track which folder a leaf belonged in – just in case I accidentally moved it to a different folder/parent. With a Binder of this size, it is difficult to tell if a leaf got moved; once moved, it is difficult to determine where it had moved from.
It would be nice to have a toggle to lock/unlock the Binder. As a workflow: you lay out your initial document tree structure, then you lock the Binder; if you later need to change the format, you specifically unlock the Binder in order to make the change.
I’m not sure how difficult this would be (the Tree widget probably doesn’t have a “no moving items” mode, so it would require additional logic to the Drop-internal handler). It may not even warrant a fix – there can’t be too many of us clumsy-fingered users working on documents with rigid hierarchies.
That said, I recently spent a month building a 200+ page technical document (read: lots of graphs and equations) with Scrivener (on Linux!), and this was the only problem I encountered. I couldn’t say the same for any other piece of software that’s more complex than vi
This topic has come up a few times in the past, as well as locking content, particularly in the research section. It’s not out of the question, but a suitably elegant way of handling locks (either organisational or content level) has yet to be arrived yet. Another potential solution, one that has technical issues at the moment, is a better degree of undo for Binder events. As I say the problem with it at the moment is technical in how undo is stacked and sorted between all of the different components in the UI that offer undo. You wouldn’t for example, want Binder undo to conflict with text editor undo.
One thing that may help, perhaps you have tried this, is to only turn on the Binder when you need it. You can just tap that button at the top left to hide it, and that should leave the more volatile organisational area inaccessible to any touchscreen mishaps.
Turn off the TAP-TO-CLICK function of your touchpad and start leading a happier life! I know how to do that on a Mac, and I suppose there is probably some way to do this also on your Linux box.
Fixing the problem at its source will give you a much wider solution.
That functionality has long been disabled! I am seriously bad with a touchpad, always running off the end of it or inadvertently lifting a finger while dragging something. Fortunately I do most of my work on the command line.
I am very new to Scrivener and have just moved all manner of Word docs, tables, plans and other schema into this amazing environment {emoticon-with-top-of-head-being-blown-off}. But as I scrolled up an down my 93 (so far) scenes, folders and documents, I have already knocked an item into another place on two occasions - ‘help, where’s it gone?’ A toggable Binder lock would be sweet.
I noticed that your request to lock binder items in place was posted in 2014. Did they ever incorporate that suggestion? I, too, have had that problem on several occasions, and have had to resort to numbering scenes to confirm the correct order before compiling.
Our preference is to work on a better binder-level undo. That is a much more intuitive response to “oops” then having to repeatedly and pre-emptively unlock and lock the outline whenever you wish to make a change to it.
Meanwhile I’d suggest trying the keyboard shortcuts (on Windows, Ctrl-ArrowKeys, and on Mac, Ctrl-Cmd-ArrowKeys) for moving items around if you have a mouse or trackpad that makes precision usage difficult. I use a combination of techniques myself. I use drag and drop to get something from one place to another if they are far apart, but I don’t care about precision at all, I just drop it somewhere vaguely correct and then use the keyboard to get it in the right spot. There really is no reason to fear any of this. You can’t destroy anything by dragging and dropping and the worst that will happen is it ends up somewhere unknown, but that’s a simple project search away to correct.
