In Scrivener 1, I’m told Ctrl-G Ctrl-Z inserts a page break.
I’d never want to do that, but I can’t get Ctrl-G to do ANYTHING. It doesn’t take me to menu options.
Any idea why? (Windows 10 under Parallels on the Mac)
Ctrl+G is one of Scrivener’s delightful little idiosyncrasies. (It’s delightful, I tell you.) I don’t know what the technical programming term is, but it’s a kind of prefix or signal: it tells the program to interpret the next keypress as a corresponding instruction. But you have to know what the needed keypress is before you press Ctrl+G; Ctrl+G by itself doesn’t open any menus or do anything else, and if you press it, then press something else to try to find the proper second keypress, you’ve broken the spell, so to speak. So if you press Ctrl+G then immediately press Ctrl+Z you get the page break. Ctrl+G Ctrl+D opens the Scrivener link dialog. Etc. It’s fun, it’s quirky, it’s delightful, I tell you. Ahem. It is actually very efficient once you’ve memorized the particular second keypresses you’re actually going to use all the time. My understanding is that it will be present still in the new v. 3. Hope this helps.
Turn on “Show Invisibles”, then try what you were trying to do. You should end up with a line where you are putting in the Ctrl+G, Ctrl+Z.
I believe that the term you are looking for is an “accelerator.”
Disregard all after “hello”. I was pressing Ctrl-S when I meant Ctrl-Z, and I didn’t test other Ctrl-G commands.
My bad.
HOWEVER, on a related note, the manual twice mentions View->Show Invisibles, but there’s no such menu item. Not at my machine.
In v1, it’s Format > Options > Show Invisibles.
I believe the practice is more common in modern UNIX software, though some old DOS programs worked that way as well (like Wordstar). These days you’ll find them in LyX and Emacs, and if you count the truly bizarre way in which Vim handles commands, those are technically multi-key “shortcuts” as well. Like how 2>j will indent the current and following two lines—but only while the editor is in command mode vs insertion mode, naturally.
…which isn’t bizarre at all if your UNIX usage goes back far enough you actually used ed back before vi became a thing. Vi was simply duplicating the command interface of ed. (Those of you MS-DOS folks who are old enough to remember edlin, same family of horror.)
Time has mercifully erased my memories of vi…
Devinganger - shame on you. Mention of edlin has triggered nightmares again. 8) That and ED in cp/m.
They both beat using magnetic needles to create the ones and zeroes by hand…
Fun – or at least stimulating – trip down memory lane. Thanks, Devin, for “accelerator.”
Yes, edlin… The amazing thing is that at some point it must have seemed like an improvement over something else … magnetic needles maybe.
Hubby used to toggle in what we would call now the BIOS. With switches. Every morning.
Something like this?
People now bitch if our computer isn’t ‘instant on’ - we used to spend half an hour just getting it ready to run a couple of lines.
Try running Scrivener on that!
My second computer was a Z80 TRS80 compatible. Every component hand soldered.
Well, I keypunched entries for a research index of periodical articles (with stopword list to attend to, etc.) onto IBM cards. 80 characters max per index entry, while including all significant people and facts, made newspaper “headline style” sound like Shakespeare. And make a typo (typing Arabic and Hebrew names), redo the card.
Exactly like that. 
. I forgot the brand name but I can’t forget that face…
80 character punch cards. Yeah, I remember those.
My first day, my first IT job, just out of school. For my very first assignment, my boss hands me a thick deck of punch cards wrapped with a rubber band. JCL program calls intermixed with a few different data sets (the latest bond valuation tables, a list of ticker symbols, that sort of thing). He briefly explained the sequence of programs that would run, what each did, and how at the end of it a big paper report would be generated that would tell us what the bank’s Muni investments were worth.
“Take 'em down to the 12th floor. That’s Operations. Go to the window, get a form from the guy, fill it out, wrap it around the deck, hand everything to the guy. Wait there. He’ll run it and give you the report. Make sure you get the deck back.”
I get on the elevator and we start heading down. There’s a certain bounce to my step. I’m smiling. I’m submitting a job! I’m really doing computers now! Soon they’ll give me a program to write, Life is good.
The elevator stops at the 12th and the doors open. As I’m exiting the rubber band breaks and punch cards go flying all over the place. I’m half in and half out of the elevator, blocking the doors as needed with parts of my body, trying to snag all the ones that landed inside the elevator, before the doors slam shut, The people waiting to continue their journey down are patient with me, more or less. Eventually a nice lady in a suit holds the Open button for me until I get all the cards collected.
I stand outside the Operations window, right there by the elevator, frantically putting the deck of cards back together. Trying to remember the program sequence my boss had explained, It takes a while, but I get the JCL for the programs done. As least, I think I do. Then I move on to putting the data sets back together. First figure out which cards belonged to which set, then sort them by hand. (Turns out sorting them by hand wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t know that at the time. It was only my first day.)
All told, this entire process probably takes an hour, and every time the elevator bell goes ‘ding!’ and the doors slide open, I’m certain my boss will come striding out, wondering where the hell I’d disappeared to.
Finally, after double and triple-checking, I think I’m done with the deck, I go to the window, get a form from the guy, fill it out with shaking hands, wrap it around the deck and hand everything over through the window. And wait, sweating and praying that the thing is right and all the programs run correctly. A while later–a long while–the guy returns to the window and slides through a big paper report and the deck of cards.
“What took you so long?” my boss asks, when I drop it on his desk
“There was a line.”
He looks at me. “Hmm. Okay. Anyway, let’s have a look at that program we need you to write.”
I found that later, but the v1 MANUAL mentions View->Invisibles, and that’s not where it is.
(It’s too late to worry much about it, of course.)
Console toggle switches? Punch cards? Magnetic memory cores?
Back in my day, we had to knap our own ones and zeroes out of flint. If we wanted a memory, we had to find our own lodestone. Now that was programming!
Seriously, though, the punch card story reminds me of one of my professors who took to writing code so that there was a GOTO at the end of every card…so you could drop the card deck, reassemble it in any order, feed it in, and the resulting program would still run.