Amber, good, thanks.
Is there a connection between the binder’s active awareness that results in selecting the item and the notes I made recently about how unrelated (displayed only?) file’s footnotes are also affected when an item in the list is “selected”?
One example of how the current operation complicates things is something that I’ve actually only begun to use routinely. How could someone in single-editor mode drag another file’s name-link from the binder to the editor-working file?
- Select a word or phrase that will constitute your link in the file you’re working on.
- Scroll though the Binder, opening and closing sub-folders/sub-files if you need to or scroll above or below to parts of the Binder not on screen, until you reach your target document in the Binder.
- Single click and drag the target document onto the text you selected—you would not have lost focus of your highlighted selection throughout the entire process.
- The selected text is now your link to the target document.
Single clicking would change focus to the target document, while clicking and immediately dragging does not change the focus document.
Yes, as noted above this in particular should not be a problem.
The main awkwardness you may encounter are cases where you have the editor split, and one side is set to automatically load the selected item(s) into the other split. The main issue there is not that the item is selected on MouseDown event, but that clicking into the other editor immediately changes the active split view, which causes the Inspector to change. Thus if your intended drop target is in the inspector (Notes or Bookmarks), you lose sight of what you intended to drop into (replaced by what you’ve picked up on the mouse). The solution there is to temporarily lock the inspector to the other split, by right-clicking on the inspector tab bar while the correct split is active.
I think that is pretty much it, but if you run into anything else, general Editor locking (as I mentioned above as one workaround for the right-click thing) is also the intended way to interact with the binder sidebar without it changing the active thing you’re working on. So while single-item drag and drop should be fine, as noted, if for example you wanted to Shift-click five items to drag them all into the editor at once, you’d need to lock the editor first.
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Thx Revo, now that you mention it, yes indeed, click-drag will get file’s name-into the working file.
(Re #1, In the working file, there’s not a word or phrase that corresponds to the to-be-inserted file link: it’s the name of the file I want there. However, there are times too that as you say, dragging the link onto selected text would be what I want. thx.)
You could type out the name as an Inline Annotation, so as not to pollute your compile with names in random spots, and then do the same as I suggested. It depends on your need.
For instance, I don’t name my scenes beyond Scene 1, Scene 2… So I have a million and one Scene 1s, etc.
I take a Field of Dreams approach to writing. I plan out my whole book of six chapter of four scenes per structure element with word count at chapter level. There are eight structure points, besides a prologue and epilogue. Then I assign the main character to every second chapter, a second character to one or two chapters per section—allocating them 12 chapters, and a third character one chapter per section for 8 chapters overall, and then random characters to take up the 8 remaining chapters. The MC has the prologue and the second character has the epilogue, named the same in each book as a running joke. So my philosophy is if you build it, the words will come. And, miracle of miracles, they do. The only thing that changes is it’s sometimes unnecessary to have four scenes, so I don’t stick to four, but never go beyond four.
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Does this relate to the “footnote” experience I posted for in Footnotes & comments -- no text loaded and the Binder recently?
Or to my 10+ second load-lag experience for any Move To or similar attempt, about which I posted a while back (Slow menus in large projects - #5 by AmberV)
I’ve split this whole tangent off to a new thread, since your question about how to drag and drop links effectively has nothing to do with right-clicking in the binder.
I am not understanding how any of these follow-up questions have anything to do with either this, or the original topic. Maybe it is better to post follow-up questions in those threads, if there is something you aren’t clear on.