I use comments a lot and they usually cover a few words of text, often a sentence.
If I want to edit some of the commented text, I click the mouse where I want the text cursor to be, but the text cursor doesn’t move. Instead the comment is selected in the inspector (if that is visible).
I’m all for the inspector being updated, but I mostly want the cursor to move.
While I can imagine cases where I wouldn’t want the text cursor to move and I just wanted to see the comment, these seem to be less common use cases and could be handled by CMD-CLICK or some other modified click.
Less common for you doesn’t mean less common for everyone.
Among other things, if someone has an imported Word document with feedback from an editor, they might need to do quite a bit of comment reviewing before they do anything to the text.
I’ve re-categorised this as a request, as the way it is currently working is definitely not a bug. It works that way on purpose, but we might consider it working differently in the future—though I do wonder if maybe some other way of deciding whether to edit the text right then and there is best, like an Alt/Opt-click sort of thing.
I, too, use comments extensively, and often struggle to get the cursor into position to edit the selected text. I click into the text so that the cursor appears at the point of the text I want to edit. On the next keystroke, the cursor skips like a stone across the water until it lands on the text immediately after the comment highlight. I can fiddle with things so that I can finally edit the commented text.
If a video would help, let me know. I do love my videos.
Being a bit of a keyboard fanatic, I’ve always used the shortcut for Navigate ▸ Inspect ▸ Comments and Footnotes which, when used while the sidebar tab is already visible, moves the cursor over there. This deliberately does not go straight into text editing because the idea is to allow for arrow key navigation, as well as collapse/expand on Left/Right arrow. So you do have to hit Enter to start (which always does at the end of the note).
Since I’m constantly moving the cursor around the project window with these keys (or the matching set in the Move Focus To submenu), it barely registers as an event to me, it’s really only the Enter key to start editing that is different.
@AmberV, I’m not entirely sure if you’re responding to my post. If so, my issue isn’t navigating the comments, but rather editing the text that’s been commented. The highlight itself serves as a kind of barrier to reaching the text, but even if I manage to reach it, any keyboard strokes used to modify the highlighted text skip the cursor off to the text immediately after the highlighted text. I can fiddle with it and eventually edit the text, so I never thought to post this as a bug. I figured it was just a cute little quirk of my favorite writing app.
Ah okay, maybe I am reading the original query in another way: as in one would want the cursor to move to the comment text (in the inspector) the moment you click on the highlight, rather than remaining in the editor. But I can see how, read in a different light, the phrasing could also be about how to position the cursor within a hyperlink or note highlight in the main editor (both have the same problem), without actually activating it.
For that, the best I have found is a very small click and drag followed by a right or left arrow, to get the cursor where you want it.
Ideally there would be some modifier for clicking into such a range and only moving the cursor, but I believe there are technical difficulties with that (on the Mac it is a problem of overloading too, in that there are already core text engine modified clicks). Kind of the opposite of how things work in most editors that run into this problem, where they have gone with the design decision that clicking on links or other activated ranges like this always place the cursor. They only activate if you hold down Ctrl and click, or something like that. Personally I think Scrivener should work the same way, that links/notes should be something you have to intentionally open rather than something that completely obscures text editing (making long highlights extremely awkward).
Good to know, and I’ll try to remember that during editing, but not relevant to my use case. I’m not editing it because there’s a comment, rather, there just happens to be a comment there.
Or even, if the comment is already selected, a second click moves the cursor. As that’s usually my first instinct before realising why it’s not doing what I want.