Hello! I searched for a similar topic but didn’t find one that has the answer… hopefully this isn’t terribly repetitive.
I was in a text file called “Chapter 4A” doing something in Scrivener a couple of nights ago and hit… something… and it automatically created a note under the “Notes” folder in the Binder. The contents of the note were the text I had selected in “Chapter 4A,” and the title of the note was “Note (Chapter 4A), 12 April 2010, 23:20.”
My question is, how did I do that? I searched the menus and help and online and can’t find anything to tell me the keyboard shortcut that I used to generate that note file. It is a super-handy feature, and now that I know it’s there, I’m sort of obsessing, trying to find it.
That would be the ever useful Cmd-L shortcut you pressed. It has two modes, the first you’ve already come across. If you press the shortcut with nothing selected it will create the text you see in the current document and link to the new one under Notes. The alternate usage is to select some text first and then press it. In this usage, the selected text gets automatically linked to the new note. If you like this feature, consider visiting the Navigation preferences and setting up how Scrivener acts with it. You can make it so it automatically opens the new note in a split for you.
When I do that with either text selected or no text selected, the new note is just blank, though. When I did whatever I did the other night, there was text in the document. But now I’m thinking maybe that was a fluke? Maybe I just kept typing after it happened and since focus had shifted to the new note, it only looked like it had copied in the selected text? And then I was just so confused because there was suddenly a new note that I didn’t realize what happened. That seems likely.
I’m not aware of anything that could do that in one step, save for the Scrivener service (which is available from anywhere on your computer once you select text) which allows you to create a new note with the selected text. However, when you use that method it places items in a folder called “Clippings”, not “Notes”, so in this case you probably just accidentally pasted text in there or something of that nature.