P. 690 of the Scrivener 3 User Manual indicates that you can select and delete a portion of the Trash folder. However, when I attempt to do this, the screen flashes, and nothing is deleted. Is there a way to partially purge the Trash folder, and if so, directions would be greatly appreciated.
On the order of small things, I’d also like to know if there is a way to do a compound search such as “delete trash.” Enclosing the search term in quotes doesn’t work for me.
Thanks,
Linn
The command as described in the appendix should be working, and indeed is doing so as expected over here (macOS 10.13.4). What do you mean by the screen flashing though? Do you have the Accessibility option enabled to flash the screen on alert? Do you not get the confirmation dialogue at all, or is the flash happening when you confirm that you want to delete these items permanently?
Well, in the meantime you can do this old fashioned way: move the other items you don’t want deleted out to a temporary folder in the binder, empty the trash and then move them back in.
As to your second question, I don’t understand the context. If you mean the Help menu search, there is no “delete trash” command, so no matter how you type it in there it wouldn’t find anything.
Thank you for your help, AmberV. Let me deal with the flash first. I had no idea there was such an option, but I did find it in the Accessibility/Audio page. So deselection solved that issue.
This is page 690:
I am also using mOS 10.13.4. I interpret the instructions to mean I should press the Delete button, wait for the confirmation (perhaps this is what initiated the flash), confirm and the selected material disappears. That does not happen. Curiously, however, a right click on my (Apple) mouse brings up the usual panel for a right click, which has the Delete command on it, and that works. The confirmation request (“Delete n files?” works–the files are deleted. So that problem is solved. When time permits, it might be helpful to amend p. 690 discussion.
My apologies regarding the last item. I did fail to give you the context. I was referring to conducting a search on this discussion board. I wanted to search the combination “delete trash.” Is there a guide somewhere to search conventions on this board (and if possible, the User Guide, too.)
Thanks!
Ah, I see the point of confusion now. The section this snippet comes from is for the Edit ▸ Delete menu command, but the description is I’ll admit a bit confusing since it refers to the actual Delete key itself in the prior paragraph—which while meant to only apply to the text editor, isn’t strictly speaking true now that I look at it again. It appears the Edit ▸ Delete command is only applicable to the text editor when there is a selection of text, so it is not in fact a menu variation of what the Delete and Fn-Delete keys do specifically.
So I might just remove the first paragraph since that’s all rather confusing anyway and leave the “delete selected text in the editor” as an undocumented side-effect. I’m sure most people just intuitively overtype or press Delete on the keyboard rather than look for menu commands to remove selected text. 
Right! The search feature provided by the forum does not support searching by phrase unfortunately. We have however since the site update opened up the forum to Web spiders, so you can now do stuff like “site:literatureandlatte.com/forum” in DuckDuckGo or whatever, to narrow down your search results.
There are of course advantages to using local search as well, but most of them (as well as syntax documentation) are located in the advanced search form, which unfortunately is not readily accessible in the new site skin unless you’re already in a search result.
I don’t think the user manual should be documenting the forum—it has enough of its plate! 
Yes, I’m like most people in this respect! I’m not sure that I was even aware of a Delete function in the Edit menu. However, what is interesting is that Edit/Delete works to remove items in Trash, which is in the Binder. In the rest of the Binder, “Move to Trash” takes the place of Delete. So it seems that the value of the Edit/Delete is just as described – it’s a “catch-all command” to try where the Delete key doesn’t seem to work.
Oh, I did not mean to imply that! 
Thanks for your help.