"Change Icon" Functionality Thoughts

Scrivener Windows Beta (Archived)
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Okay, so I’m cross-posting this on suggestion from the general win feedback section and I’m hoping admins won’t make a shark stew of me for doing so. :wink: :smiley: :mrgreen:

This based on Win Beta 27, build version 723513.

So, I’m working on a long term project that has created quite a lot of notes beyond the actual writing I’ve done. And so I’ve been relying on different functions in order to be able to quickly find my way around the binder. One of those functions is the ability to change icon for different documents.

I’m probably too prolific at importing new icons, as well, And I might hang for that one, I guess. But I’ll take it.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that this specific function feels very much infant 1990’s at best, and I miss a lot of feature functionality that I’d just love to see.

NOTE: I do NOT demand that this is something that need to be added immediately, while forcing the Win v.3 to be pushed back any more. Or any somesuch. I just want to give a bit of feedback in hope of having my prayers listened to and eventually answered.

I have no idea how this works on Mac, but in Windows, you are unable to:

  1. Sort any items in the icon list.

  2. Make any reshuffle of imported icons.

  3. Create and use own folders.

  4. Delete any already imported icons (this might actually be a bug, as there is such a functionality implied via the +/- buttons in the UI. The minus just won’t function. And even though I try to delete a few icons in the add/subtract UI, those same icons will still be there when going back to the “select icon” part of the UI. And when opening manage window, these same previously deleted icons will still be there. So… nothing can be erased, apparently.

  5. Reach any icons that have “fallen over the edge” of the “select icons” UI window. There is no scrolling function at all. Which means what falls over the edge is “sort of there”, but cannot ever be found again.

  6. Add new icons after the “fall over the edge” has occured.

  7. Rename already added icons (would truly be great if possible).

  8. Sort by character, file type, date added or any other kind of automatic sorting.

This leaves the UI and the functionality of this feature probably useful for those (most people?) who don’t use as many different icons as I tend to do. But for me, it is utterly unhelpful beyond a certain point, that - again - in my own case, is quite quickly reached. For me and my preferred mode of use, this is basically a car crash. And I would just love to see some love given to this function one day or another.

And at least the no-subtraction “probable bug” would be great to see fixed, still, sooner rather than later.

What are your thoughts on this function? Do others actually use it, and have others run into the same trouble as I have? What do the support and programmer people think about it? Does it look and function the way it does because it is planned that way, and it is just how it was always meant to be, or can something be done to look these issues over when time and resources allow?

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  • Folder organisation: that’s a planned feature, not on the slate for 3.0 it looks like. It will be simple, by naming convention.
  • Delete icons, naturally, that should be working. Perhaps this is fixed in the internal build I’m using, though I don’t see any notes about it. I’d run a fresh check with a newly added icon, assign it, then delete it. The expected result should be the item in the binder loses its assignment immediately, and of course the icon will be gone. Well—in the meanwhile, you can always manually remove them from the disk. They are in the Icons subfolder of the project. This won’t hurt anything—the item will remain assigned in the background, but in fact that’s how it works when you delete one as well. If an icon by that name should ever return, it would go back to being assigned.
  • Super big menus: that’ll be a Qt (dev kit) problem most likely—but yeah, you need folders it sounds like. :slight_smile: Screenwide menus shouldn’t be a thing that people run into on a regular basis.
  • Rename: that should be working as well. Just double-click or F2, as per standard?
  • Sorting in general: there are no plans for it. Again this feels a bit like a missing-folders problem, with a dash of renaming issues. Manipulating the order of things via alphanumeric naming should be adequate for most cases.

Overall, yeah it sounds like you use this a lot more than most people do, but that’s okay! It just means you’ll run into the edges of it a bit more than most, and in that you are correct: it isn’t really a full-blown metadata feature or something with a lot of scalability to it. The original design intent was for them to be used rather sparingly, to add spice to the binder list where needed, and preferably not often by hand, but via Document Templates.

For my own usage, I do make heavy use of icons—but seldom even look at that menu—I associate them with types and I codify types as templates more often than not. And document templates of course have all manner of organisational capabilities, given they are binder items.

But that’s not for everyone, if you use one here and one there, or use them as a form of status, it doesn’t really make sense to use templates to set them.

By the way, hopefully you’ve found that in the beta you can Alt-click on an item to go directly to the icon menu.

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Even the simplest folder support would be a godsent for me, obviously. Thank you for info and for giving me a bit of hope on that front. Will be awaiting it with some gusto, I imagine. :smiley: :wink:

Yeah, I kind of know I probably use those icons a bit more and in different ways than most people do. I never really planned on having such a system going, but I ended up there anyways. Sauntering vaguely down the slope toward icon h*ll, I suppose. But I’m a little bit stuck with it. For now, anyways. And I enjoy it when it works.

Thanks also for tips and thoughts. I appreciate it a lot! One, I had recently discovered. But there were obviously some notes I’ll be taking with me henceforth. Like renaming, which I haven’t gotten to work as yet, but probably does work just fine. And being able to delete icons physically from system folder, which is such a thing that I didn’t really dare to venture into in fear that it might corrupt the app itself or the document in some way.

So I’m very pleased with that. Cheers!

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That’s not a bad reflex to have! There are a few things that Scrivener assembles dynamically from the disk, without any overarching metadata to handle them. Old snapshots are something you can clean out safely from that folder, for example. Obviously there are others worth staying well out of, like the Files/Docs folder, unless you study up on the format a bit. We do try to keep things somewhat clear in that regard through naming schemes. If you have thirty icons in your project and they all have clear names, the same one you see in your project, then chances are you can modify the file system while the project is closed. If you see a bunch of random UUIDs and checksums, run aawaaay!

You can get your system ready for folders by adopting the naming convention, which is optimised toward file system sorting (and thus menu sorting without the feature). It is:

Category Name (Icon Name).ext

So for example, one of the built-in icons is named “Notes (Green Notepad).png” on the disk.

Maybe a bit bulky to look at in the menu, but it will keep things grouped, and one day they’ll all neatly compact into subfolders by category.

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Awesome! Thanks again. Big time. That’s really good stuff to know.