It’s not a bad instinct, to try and use the Bookmarks feature this way, but overall it’s not quite the right tool for the job, as you’ve discovered. Bookmarks have three primary functions:
- Quick editor navigation.
- Referencing bookmarked content (as used in the Inspector’s Bookmarks tab).
- Here you may note that groups you’ve bookmarked have a down-arrow on their right, that you can use to access child items directly. However the focus of this tool is still referencing, as that loads the item into the editor below it. It’s a bit volatile though, it goes away easily if you look at something else and then come back. I prefer this tool for grouping similar notes together that I might need to look at sporadically. It’s not so good as a substitute for primary binder+editor(s) navigation.
- Another approach, if you’re using the inspector for other things, is to use the
Project ▸ Project Bookmarksmenu command while holding down the Option key. This loads a Quick Reference window with the bookmarks sidebar open (Mac only; on Windows you need to open anything in Quick Reference and then click the bookmark icon in the footer bar).
- Menu navigation: for menus such as
Navigate ▸ open Quick Reference, bookmarks will be pinned to the top for quick access, orDocuments ▸ Move To.
There are other uses for the feature, to be sure, but those are the main benefits.
What I expected Bookmares to do, was to act like the finger tabs in a big dictionary, and position the binder so that the book mark was some fraction of the viewport from the top, and hilight it.
Instead it only brings the document up. So If if I book mark…
Yes, you could say it gets straight to the point. 99.9% of the time the reason to look at something in the binder and click on it is to load it over into the main editor.
As you later noted, if you want to also for some reason see the vertical position of the item you are editing in a list, that is what the Reveal in Binder command is for.
I was also surprised to find that the bookmark popup can’t be resized.
You must be referring to the simple popup that appears when clicking on the icon in the toolbar? If so, drag that popup away to detach it as a floating window (on Windows it comes up floating directly), which will be persistent and can be sized how you want.
To return to what you’re trying to accomplish though, I don’t quite know what you mean about having to see the folder in the binder, so that you can then find a specific section within it, in order to load the item into the editor itself. The bookmark should load the group itself into the editor, which you can then (if necessary) select an appropriate group view mode, such as Outliner or Corkboard, and then load it from there.
Some things that can help you out:
- You can use the Spacebar to load the selected item, from the corkboard or outliner view. There are also keyboard shortcuts for loading things either into the same editor, as Spacebar does, or into the other split view. Both are found in the
Navigate ▸ Opensubmenu (where you will find a bunch of other options too). - If you, like me, tend to nest text into text sections rather than using folders, the setting in Behaviors: Folders & Files, to Treat all documents with subdocuments as folders, will make your life much better.
- You can go “up” from anything you’ve specifically loaded into the editor, via the shortcut for
Navigate ▸ Go To ▸ Enclosing Group, but while there also note the Next and Previous Document shortcuts. If you’re working within one group, one subdocument to the next, it will be faster to just go straight to the next thing rather than “up” and back “down”.
But, that all said, if I wanted to get to “you’re impossible”, and I know it by that name, then I’d just hit the shortcut for Quick Search (WinCtrlG / ⌃⌘G) and type in as much as the title as you need to get it within striking distance. I only traverse hierarchy if I don’t know what something is called.
I too have very tall binders in most of my projects, and I too keep most of them entirely collapsed for that reason, available only for high level navigation, and a significant percentage of the items I load are done so with the Quick Search tool. It can be very efficient.
The rest are mostly navigated to by using the two-split interface as a secondary “binder”. I write more about this technique in detail, in this post. There is some good discussion on general navigation below that post, too.
Yeah. Not a good examkple. Use project search, then find.
But there is another example where I need to edit the reaction differently to an event, and so will need to change 5-6 files in a row.
So this is where Scrivenings mode can help you, and yes in fact with Project Search as well.
- For search results:
- Refer to Figure 10.3 in the user manual PDF. The button marked (b) is what you are looking for. This will load the search results into the main editor, where you can then press Ctrl1 /
⌘1click the Scrivenings button in the toolbar).
- Refer to Figure 10.3 in the user manual PDF. The button marked (b) is what you are looking for. This will load the search results into the main editor, where you can then press Ctrl1 /
- For any selection of items:
- You can do the same thing. For example hold down Ctrl/Cmd and click on five different text items in the binder to load them all into the editor. Shift-click will select ranges. For doing this in the Outliner, say you got there via one of your bookmarks, you would select your items, then use the Spacebar to load them all together, then switch to scrivenings view.
- But of course, if you prefer to edit one at a time, the previous tip for Next and Previous navigation will be better for “five in a row” type editing.
Back to Bookmarks: something I’ve learned for myself is to not be shy about adding and removing them frequently. It’s can very much operate as a scratch board area for the stuff you are currently working on, reducing dependency upon the binder for all navigation. This is definitely more useful when the stuff you are editing comes from all over the place. If I’m doing a complex edit that involves a dozen or different chunks of text from all over the binder, I’ll make sure each of those are listed in Bookmarks so I can hop around swiftly, only having to use the more expensive navigation tools (search and hierarchy navigation) to get to that point initially. When I’m done, nuke the list and move on to the next thing.