I’m breaking an old habit and making an outline in Scrivener for a change. I’m simply adding scenes to a single list at first before I go back to organise all of them, so I’m typing titles and synopses and notes and then hitting…
Command N.
I hit that expecting to get a new node in the outline, but that’s NOT the case if my text cursor is in the Synopsis or Notes pane. What I get instead is a whole blank screen with nothing in each of the panels, and I’m suddenly reaching for the mouse to try to get back to my outline.
Noo!
So please make Command N add a new node to the Outline when typing in either of these panes AND remain in the same view of the Outline. I do get a new node now, but the view’s all wrong and very jarring.
I’ve honestly triggered this about 8 more times just today since filing this! It’s thoroughly un-Scrivener-like.
To be clear, the important bit is: remain in the same view of the Outline. Command N is making new nodes, but the lost context really throws me off my Outline.
I can definitely see an argument for this, as the inspector is a function of what is being worked on in the editor, and in keeping with the left-to-right navigation principle in Scrivener overall, that editing notes or keywords or whatever shouldn’t disturb the editor’s view, or how you got to that inspector in the first place.
My guess is that the reasoning for it working this way is somewhat more technical in nature though, in that it might be excessively complicated to figure out what the right move is, from that context. I’ll put it on the list for consideration though.
Meanwhile though (as I can’t promise that will ever change, or any time soon), I always have a habit of putting my focus back in the editor before outlining, for multiple reasons. I never really thought about this one, but in thinking about it, having that habit has kept this from every being an issue for me.
The dedicated shortcuts for editor focus are in the Navigate ▸ Move Focus To submenu, and of course the inspector has its own set of shortcuts in the Navigate menu (which is how I got into the notes field or whatever to begin with).
Yes, I’m a keyboard wizard, too, with shortcuts like Command Option Control I (to go into the Synopsis pane) long hardwired into my mind. The sheer reach of Scrivener’s keyboard accessibility is a major draw of the software for me. I’m loathe to reach for the trackpad when I’m in the zone, let alone leave the computer!
8 years or more of Scrivener use is why I feel so strongly that this particular behaviour is an oversight, not a feature. It feels downright wrong. Smacking into it repeatedly today, I knew I needed to point it out, as it’s nested fairly deep and plausibly just hasn’t come up to annoy anyone before.
Back at my outline again, I have found a mitigation for this problem, but not a fix.
Select Navigate > Editor > Lock in Place (Command Option L) and the Outline view will stay in the outline when you make new entries with Command N while in the Synopsis or Notes panes. Phew!
The downside is that keyboard focus seems to get a bit hairy, so while things look alright, you can’t just type away on a new note in confidence. You need to Control Tab back to the Outline view to get back to work.
Hairy? Well, it seems to either start a new note, just with the current pane active for input, or sometimes it seems to be nowhere at all and nothing happens when you type. I haven’t discovered the logic.
So what I want is for Command N to make a new node in the outline with keyboard focus on the new blank node’s Title field. I always title them first, the other fields are just annotation, which I’m happy to navigate to manually each time.