I regularly work on multiple Scrivener projects at the same time, and currently my workflow is quite annoying: click ‘Scrivener’ on the toolbar, and it opens up the most recent project I’ve been working on, which most of the time isn’t the one I want. So I go to Recent Projects and open it from there. Then, later, I try and remember to close them in the right order so the one I want later is likely to be the first one to open.
What would help a lot is if Windows Jump Lists were supported, so I could just right click the Scrivener icon and access the Recent Projects from there (see e.g. right-clicking Chrome to see a list of recently visited websites and just clicking one to go straight there).
I appreciate this is a minor niggle, but it would help my workflow immensely. Every Scrivener update I get excited that maybe this time jump lists have been added, but each time I am disappointed so thought I would come to the forums and vote for the feature.
I think this already works, though before the 1.9 upgrade, it just showed you a bunch of “project.scrivx” files. Now, once you upgrade your projects, it will replace “project” with the name of the enclosing “.scriv” folder, so that right-clicking on the Scrivener icon in the taskbar will show “Best Selling Novel.scrivx”, “Best Selling Sequel.scrivx”, instead of the former “project.scrivx” and “project.scrivx”, respectively.
EDIT: Sorry, I see what you mean now; the Recent Projects list and the jump list I’m seeing are not related; opening a project from within Scrivener doesn’t seem to add the .scrivx file to the jump list either.
Also, I can’t figure out how the recent items wound up in my jump list; new ones are not being added as I open them from within Scrivener or by double-clicking their .scrivx files…
Interesting rdale… I’m on the latest version, but my jump list is entirely blank. I just tried opening from Explorer (as previously I’ve only ever opened projects from within Scrivener) but just as you mention it doesn’t populate the jump list.
In fact, I’ve never seen it add any projects there. If there’s a way of doing it I’d love to know, so if you manage to figure it out do update
Meantime, hopefully the devs will see this and consider adding the feature.
Supporting jump lists from recent projects is already on our list to look into. What you can do now, and is possibly what Robert’s seeing, is specifically pin your project files to Scrivener by dragging them from File Explorer onto Scrivener’s icon in the taskbar.
You can also disable the auto-load option, so Scrivener opens straight to the New Project window if you just launch the program itself. That at least saves you the step of closing a project you don’t want. There’s a checkbox for this under the General tab of Tools > Options.
In Win7, I work on multiple Scrivener projects at the same time the old school way: I add a shortcut to the projectname.scrivx files to my Favorites folder.
If your Favorites folder is already too cluttered for this, another option is to create a new toolbar folder that contains the project shortcuts, and launch the projects from there.
Good to know it’s on the roadmap, and thanks for the couple of workarounds - my lazy workflow is now more streamlined. Didn’t know you could pin by dragging, that really helps.
You can also search for *.scrivx files using the Windows file explorer, and save that search to the sidebar. There’s a “Save Search” button near the top of the explorer window, next to the “Organize” drop-down list.
Once you have that saved search, you can sort on modified date (or whatever columns you like), and double-click whichever projects you want to work on at the moment. This is especially handy now that the Windows version of Scrivener renames the project.scrivx file to match the actual project name. Very useful in tracking down projects that can (should?) be updated to the new format.
