I use lists. A lot. It had become second nature for me to use the keyboard shortcut to create an indented bulleted list in my Scapple notes. So when I was working on my class outline today and the shortcut didn’t work…
I couldn’t find any other shortcut to achieve the same result (I tried quite a few likely contenders, as well as a few unlikely ones). The best I could manage was an indented line, but no auto bulleted lists anymore. Is this a deliberate design decision or just a passing byproduct of fixing something else for version 1? Obviously I’d like the functionality back, but at least knowing if was gone for good would help.
Other than that, v1.0 (as with the betas) has been a pleasure. Congratulations on getting it “live” and I hope the Mac App store gets its act together for you soon.
Scapple has never supported properly formatted, rich-text bulleted lists, so I’m not quite sure which shortcut you mean here. (There was a bug where it didn’t disable them in an earlier build, I think, but they didn’t work properly because that sort of formatting isn’t supported by the editor, seeing as rich text bullets require tab stops and paragraph indents, which aren’t part of Scapple.) To created bulleted lists, just use Opt-8 to create a bullet, the same as you would in a plain text editor.
Thanks for the congratulations, and for all your support during beta-testing!
It didn’t create “proper” bulleted lists, but it did automatically indent a list (to one level only) and preface each line with a hyphen, creating the visual effect of a bulleted list. It would readjust the indent when I stopped editing a note (from, I think, tab-hyphen-space to tab-hyphen-tab), but that was OK - the effect was what I needed.
I think the shortcut was Opt-Tab (I’ve tried so many alternatives now, it’s disrupted my muscle memory) - whatever it was it definitely inserted a tab-hyphen-tab in the finished note (see screenshot below) and each subsequent line would inherent the same formatting making it easy to rapidly create a list. In the example below, I only used the shortcut in the first row of my “list”. I have examples using this shortcut going back to at least March 20, maybe earlier. It was such a simple, effective and intuitive way of creating a (sort-of) bulleted list that I always assumed it was a deliberate design decision. I mentally thanked you on numerous occasions during recent weeks for this “feature” alone.
The closest I can get now is Opt-Shift-Tab which tab-indents a line, but with no hyphen and it has to be manually entered on each line.
EDIT: I’ll try to recover the most recent Scapple beta from a backup and retest.
OK, I’ve done some investigating, testing the two most recent beta versions. The bullet list “feature” that I loved seems to have been introduced in beta 0.9.0.4; it was not available in 0.9.0.3. The keyboard shortcut was definitely Opt-Tab.
I have the day off today, so made a short screencast to demonstrate it in action. I’d love to have it back in an update.
It wasn’t “introduced”; it was a bug. I know what you mean now, too. In betas prior to 0.9.0.4, the Opt-tab shortcut had been blocked. In beta 0.9.0.4 it was accidentally un-blocked. In 1.0, it is blocked again, and instead is used to out-dent notes. Hit tab to indent; shift-tab or opt-tab to out-dent again.
As you note, in 0.9.0.4, when you finished editing, the formatting would change; that’s not desirable behaviour. Exactly the same effect can be achieved by simply typing a hyphen and a space instead of hitting Opt-tab.
Not exactly the same effect. It now involves typing Tab then Hyphen then Tab on every line, rather than just Opt-tab on the first line only (which makes a significant cumulative difference to flow when preparing a list), so this was a bug that I loved. Along with Cmd-Return, this was possibly the “feature” I used the most in the final beta. I was fine with the change in formatting because the functionality was so useful. If you’ve banished it for good, then I guess it’s not to return. However, should you ever change your mind (or the “bug” creeps back in), know that at least one user would be ever so grateful.
I don’t want the whole note indented, only my “lists” (they’re rarely actual lists, but I’ll call them that for simplicity). Space, hyphen, space also works but still requires as many key actions and the need to repeat on each line. Part of what I liked about the feature-bug was that I only needed to invoke it on the first line of a list, then it would automatically indent and bullet (hyphenate) subsequent lines.
Note: I’m not complaining (well, not much), just responding to your question.
Master Kevin,
My human, The Rt. Hon. Obtuse Obnoxiousness, is now a Scapple-ing Scrivener. Mumbling variations on a theme of, “Finally! At last! A chance to get in touch with the inner me…the real me.”
Master Kevin, is it possible that this whole Scapple thing is just a woefully misguided step too far in the wrong direction?
I know what you mean now, too. In betas prior to 0.9.0.4, the Opt-tab shortcut had been blocked. In beta 0.9.0.4 it was accidentally un-blocked. In 1.0, it is blocked again, and instead is used to out-dent notes. Hit tab to indent; shift-tab or opt-tab to out-dent again.