I keep Scrivener open permanently; done so since the days of version 1. Now with version 3 if Scrivener is left running for 24 hours then all open projects will be marked as changed whether or not the user has typed anything at all. Spotted this this morning when I switched from my web browser to Scrivener and noticed that every open project had a ● against them in the Window sub-menu!
Strange, I haven’t noticed this myself. On my MacBook I leave Scrivener and my writing projects open all of the time, and I’m not seeing them marked like this. The only thing that can mark a project as changed is a change actually happening, although on odd occasions the dot can go a bit out of sync since it seems some internal Apple mechanisms can affect that even when Scrivener is telling Apple’s code that a project isn’t edited. I have very rarely seen that affect the main window, though - it more often affects subsidiary windows.
Other than leaving projects open (which I do already), is there another set of steps that seems to consistently trigger the issue?
I’m going to disagree with Keith here and suggest that leaving projects open constantly is unwise, especially if you also use iOS Scrivener. In theory, it should be completely safe. In practice, there are just too many things that can go wrong.
Bringing Scrivener to the front with the task switcher after an extended time in the background; typically it’s the first fronting of Scrivener than causes this.
Since the release of the Scrivener for iOS I’ve not noticed any problem doing this. Any glitches are due entirely to my not syncing from iOS back to Dropbox when I’ve been editing. The worst of those being that Scrivener for macOS will report the presence of conflicts that turn out not to be there — namely it hasn’t created anything in the Conflicts folder.