Hi,
I work for years on Scrivener but I just realized that when I hit Command+Q, the app quits without asking a confirmation. As I happen to often use Command+A to change the style of existing files (ahem, no themes or “real” stylesheets to do the job), I often strike the wrong character and have to relaunch the app.
Is there a way to request confirmation before quitting ? I found nothing in the preferences.
Thanks
passage,
Fellow Scriv user here – passing through with an idea:
You can use your Apple System Prefs to change the key command for Quit (in Scrivener) to something you will not accidentally hit. For example, maybe opt-cmd-Q.
I so rarely quit out of Scrivener, it hardly even needs a key command in my workflow!*
-gr
p.s. Of course, you would not lose any work if you accidentally quit out of Scriv.
Yeah, I’d recommend an approach of that nature. It would be very unusual to ask for confirmation on quit, especially in a program that auto-saves like Scrivener.
About once a week I inadvertently quit Scrivener while trying to close a window with Command W, easily hitting the Command Q by mistake.
With the larger files I’m often working on, it takes a minute for the file to save and another minute to re-open. If there were a quit confirm option, as seen in many other programs where closing windows is a common command (ie Chrome), it would be quite useful and much appreciated.
Just as an opposing viewpoint:
I gladly put up with the occasional “oops I meant to type ctrl-w but hit ctrl-q” Scrivener shutdown rather than have the constant annoyance of “did you really mean to quit?” I loathe that mickey-mouse bs.
Just as an opposing-opposing viewpoint:
I’ve remapped Close Tab and Quit Scrivener to Cmd+Opt+W & Q, because I used to frequently close Scrivener accidentally due to mistyping some other key-command – can’t recall which.
If it were just close and reopen, I’d not bother with the remapping, but there are many more issues:
So, although I loath “Did you really mean that?” message-boxes too, in Scrivener’s case I would very much appreciate the option.
Exactly that. I’m frequently opening multiple projects at once. The time to wind them down and re-open each one starts to add up.
If a project is that large, I’d put it on a diet. For instance, my WIP (Work In endless Procrastination) uses quite a few images, but I keep them external to the project, so Scrivener doesn’t need them until Compile.
https://www.notion.so/deepspacecorps/Managing-Images-in-Scrivener-c0d536a7edd94d2b81a789f4d4d7d606
You can link to reference material in a similar way.
I appreciate the tip but in this instance my projects are almost all text files with very little if any images included in the documents. For several reasons it doesn’t make sense in my case to reduce the file size particularly as the only negative of that size is that it takes a long time to save, open, and close–which isn’t inconvenient except when accidentally quitting the program.
If the project is only text and takes a ling time to open, your machine is abysmally slow or there’s a serious problem of another kind. Even a million words would be not many megabytes.
Might help?
Merx
Maybe a preference (off by default) that allows such a confirmation to be used by people who want it and don’t want to remap their key bindings for one program?
That type of option would be terrific.
What he said. Do you have a lot (and I mean a LOT) of snapshots? Are you saving to a USB stick or other relatively slow media (which we don’t recommend)?
When you say “a minute” do you mean a literal minute, or does it just seem like a long time because it’s an interruption?
Katherine
Nice find. Thanks 
I don’t use snapshots. Usually I have 3-6 projects open, most of them are 90-95% text. Some contain JPGs, one in particular is a bit more image heavy, but the files aren’t large. The biggest is a few hundred MB’s. The machine is a 2019 MacBook.
To answer your questions: When I accidentally quit and they all save, close down and need to be re-opened, it takes a literal few minutes.
Sure, it’s not a huge inconvenience, but it’s enough that I’m doing it regularly by accident and if the option was there to turn off one-click quit I’d certainly select that option.
More to the point, and regardless of the file size or the duration of the interruption, it sounds like I’m not the only person who’d find this feature useful.
A few hundred megabytes is a big project. My 200,000-word project was less than 30 megabytes before removing all the images, and I rarely have more than one project open, never three.
Also check to see if
(a) the images were embedded (dragged directly into) text files
(b) you’re in scrivenings mode when you open (that can be slow to open)
(c) if you’re including synchronization in the time it takes to close. Sync for the project should be almost instantaneous, since everything but the Binder is already current, but the zip backup is everything. It can take a long time to sync to the cloud (if it’s going to a sync service) or an external drive, etc.
I use <$img> tags in the text when I want to include images in the narrative, so that they’re not opened until Compile. If the images are directly embedded and you’re opening a scrivenings, that will be slooow.
https://www.notion.so/deepspacecorps/Managing-Images-in-Scrivener-c0d536a7edd94d2b81a789f4d4d7d606
Again, I appreciate all the tips and suggestions for ways to change how I use the application. Perhaps that’s information that will be useful to others.
Just to reiterate, this isn’t some major bug of the program.
Yet, I know for myself, and it sounds like others as well, a potentially useful feature would be to allow users to go into settings to toggle off the one-click quit. Regardless of file size or image embeds or synching or whatever else–just turning off the ability to quit accidentally would be one I personally would welcome. That’s really it. Your experience might differ.
I’ve often accidentally Quit Scrivener, which kicks off a multi-minute backup process due to the extensive reference files (wonderfully organized and available via a Scrivener ‘merged’ Tab) I need to have available when writing, so thank you for the reference.
However, when I downloaded the app and attempted to open it, I received the following message:
I wonder if the ‘SlowQuitApps’ application can perhaps be made available via the Apple App Store, or if the app can otherwise be configured so it may be verified as malware free?
scrive
If you want to a run a program made by someone that isn’t paying Apple’s yearly developer tax, you can right-click on it in Applications and select “Open” manually. That should then provide an override dialogue box to run it anyway, and once you do that once it will run normally from that point on. That’s at least how it used to work, I don’t know as much about macOS 10.15 and 11. They’ve been locking things down and making it harder to do what you want for years now.