It would be good to have a better way of accessing collections. After 8 or 9 collections, the unresizeable panel starts scrolling and hiding what’s there, including what could easily be your most important binder sets, including the “binder” itself, as they always seem to be at the (physical) bottom of the list… which isn’t really a list, but a collection of actual object things. It gets claustrophobic, which puts an effective limit on the number of collections.
A floating Collections panel would be nice. The Favorites box could fill in for that maybe, cept it don’t do collections. So it’s also kind of, hmm…
I handle this by grabbing the divider between the Binder and the Collections List and sliding it down to make the Collections List large enough to comfortably show all at once. I then use the Show/Hide Collections icon (or the keyboard shortcut) to only show the list of Collections when I need it, and hide it straight away afterwards.
Hmm. My collections panel can be resized from a minimum of 3, to a maximum of 7.
I do only show it when I need it. But I’m comparing different document sequences, which keeps it open a lot, and there’s some extraneous clicking and scrolling, that a floating panel (cf Keywords etc) would solve.
None of the panels can be resized up and down. They can be closed or open, but the ones on the inspector, in practice, they’re open all the time. But on that side, I don’t mind keeping the whole inspector closed. I find my binder hidden much less often.
What happens when you horizontally expand the inspector, seems a little odd to me.
I am bumping this, in the hope of reducing Collections Claustrophobia and getting a more useful, less cumbersome and scroll-drag-click-intensive collections UI. Perhaps, as mentioned in the OP, a floating collections window.
That looks nice. It would be great to be able to expand it to the height of the monitor or the application window, whichever came first.
The appeal of a floating window, really, is to be able to see its contents and the binder/side panel at the same time. In that sense, a second “floating side panel,” in addition to the currently fixed one, is something I’ve often wanted, so as to see different ranges within the Binder view, or to compare a Collection and a Binder view at the same time.
That’s a reasonable desire, and I think it will be sufficiently addressed (at least from personal experience, I do work with Collections and Binder side by side, so I know where you are coming from, even if it is my own take on it) once you can load a collection into any split, with a single click. Right now you can “Select All”, but that isn’t the same as actually viewing the collection as a Corkboard, because when you’re doing that, you can close the main collection view to return to the Binder, and freely organise the collection in the split, including dragging items in from the Binder, or out to collection them all in a literal location, or even changing their physical order in the collection.
Or if you could organize collections into folders, like in the binder, they could be selectively expanded. I think I’ve read enough posts on the forum to see that that feature wouldn’t be considered useful enough for a sufficient amount of users. But it would be awesome. The collection itself would be a special folder, and the files inside could expand just as they do in the binder. But no worries.
That’s kind of how they were in the very first version of Scrivener. They were “smart folders” that were organised in the main binder. That approach was scrapped when the Collections feature was designed, because part of the desired approach was to be able to create your own lists of items, in custom orderings, not just what can be derived from search results.
While cloning, or showing an outline node in more than one part of the tree is not entirely unheard of, it wasn’t something the software was ready for, and there we concerns such would be more confusing on the whole, than useful to those that get it.
It is clearer and easier to learn if the list you are creating is obviously not the binder outline. So while the feature might evolve further in the future, that is at least how it ended up the way it did today.
Yes, I made this suggestion years ago and it was shot down by Keith.
I used to use Collections heavily, but without a way to organise them, it became a headache, so I changed the way I work. I only have three collections now: To Do annotations; files modified in past day; all notes.
However, I’ve just started using BetterTouchTool, so I might be able to simulate the structure I would like in that.
