I am a grateful NaNoWriMo beta user and look forward to hitting my 50k and buying Scrivener.
One step that would speed my workflow greatly, would be the addition of Footnote (and less often Annotate) in an OS X context menu. To be able to right click (control click) and have those as additional items would make life easier. I am using Note and Annotate quite a bit to so that I can come back later and deal with a particular section or words.
The quicker I can jot the note and continue writing the more likely I am to stay in my “writing zone”.
For me the most useful would be:
Notes - use it 4x or more times per session
Footnote - use heavily in the research phase, occasionally in writing scenes.
Annotate - least used by me so far.
Thank you for considering this request. And thank you even more for providing the demo for NaNoWriMo. Scrivener is my constant companion right now, and I enjoy our time together
I suppose the issue is that everybody has their favourite commands they’d like to be on the context menu and there’s only so much space.
Just a thought, and apologies if you’ve already considered this, but if you’re looking for speed, and you’re using these features so often, what about using the shortcuts - even less disruptive to the workflow than having to find the mouse / trackpad.
For inline footnotes and annotations, these are intuitive and consistent:
For inline footnotes - Cmd-Shift-F
For inline annotations - Cmd-Shift-A
‘Inspector’ footnotes and comments are Shift-Opt-8 and Ctrl-Opt-8 respectively.
For document notes: if the inspector is not already in the notes pane, then Ctl-Opt-Cmd-H will bring the pane up and pressing it a second time will put the cursor key there. (If the notes inspector pane is already up, then just press the combination once.)
For all except the inline annotations and footnotes, you’ll be left in the inspector, so using either Ctl-Opt-Cmd-E or Ctl-Opt-Cmd-R (depending whether you have a second editor open) will take you back to the text again.
Written out like that, this seems daunting, but in practice I find that it quickly becomes second nature. One of the real benefits of Scrivener for me is that a tremendous amount of thought and work has gone into make the program shortcut friendly and this really reduces friction in the workflow
And I don’t think it was mentioned above in that excellent summary, but you can also use the Esc key to jump back from a note to where you were in the editor. So a combination of Shift-Cmd-8 and Esc can be very efficient. Inline annotations are also very frictionless, as they don’t require any more disturbance to your workflow than typing in italic or bold text. You just switch it on and off as you type. If you prefer to stash them “offline” once you’ve finished writing out a section, there is a handy tool in Format/Convert/ just for doing so. I myself am a fan of the inline notes, in part because they are so frictionless, and could see how even if one preferred to keep notes sidelined and out of view, when it comes to bulk writing it might be useful to consider this two-stage approach—not that adding notes and Escaping back to the text is difficult either—but it is one less HUD open in full screen; or the lack of the inspector getting in the way if the screen is smaller.
