I use a ruler, so it’s easy to notice. Proper editor’s width:
After activation of the scrollbar, editor’s width shrinks a little bit. Notice the right side of the ruler and compare it with picture above:
That’s the scrollbar – in the second image, you’ve input enough text that the scrollbar appears, taking up part of the right margin. I’m not sure why the scrollbar appears within the fixed-with boundaries rather than outside it, but as far as I know Scrivener has always done this. I tend to work around it by hitting enter until the scrollbar appears before I begin typing anything, so I don’t get caught unawares by the shift.
Well, this is mildly infuriating. I think this should be considered as a bug, I mean look at the grey line below the ruler - this is not a normal behavior.
It may be how it’s always been, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a bug that could be fixed. Visually, there’s no need to shrink the horizontal text area when you have all that blank space around the text.
I did notice that when I turn off the fixed width editor setting, and restart Scrivener, the area where the scroll bar is just disappeared. In that version of the editor, the scroll bar will appear within the editor window, necessitating the shifting of text to prevent it from overlapping. I’m not sure why the fixed width editor reserves that space for the scroll bar while the ‘variable’ width editor does not… but if they’re going to make the interface different for the both of them, presumably it’s to avoid shifting the text around when the scroll bar appears.
In fact the Appearance option “Scrollbars next to text when using fixed width”, would imply that the scroll bars should always be visible when set, even when there’s no scrolling possible, so as to avoid this issue. Oddly, checking it (and restarting Scrivener) removes the area to the right where the scroll bar appears. “Scrollbars next to text” implies that the scroll bars aren’t IN the text area to me, but next to it.
In short, there appear to be 2 bugs, or 1 bug + 1 UI issue:
When using a fixed width editor with the scroll bar area always visible, adding enough text to the editor should not make the text shift over, since there’s already an area reserved for the scroll bar. Also, the wording of “Scrollbars next to text when using fixed width” is too ambiguous, and should be changed to something like “Scrollbars appear within text area when using fixed width” or something similar… if that’s what the option is supposed to do.