I understand that in the Scrivenings model the highlight bar is used for another purpose. Nevertheless, showing the current section is important for a large project. So may it be possible to use an underline to show the current section in the navigation bar?
Have you tried using View/Reveal in Binder (Opt-Cmd-R)? If you aren’t sure where you are, that’s meant to be your go-to tool.
Yes, I’ve tried. But apparently it’s not what I want. I want my current location be showed in the navigation bar in a real-time fashion.
Briar, Thank you for your suggestion! But that does not work for me.
Let’s make a metaphor.
What I want is: A map that shows my current location in real-time fashion, so that I could check where I am and enable to me to do some interaction with neighboring entities whenever possible.
AmberV’s solution: A map that won’t update automatically, instead, I have to manually update everytime when I want to know my location. This solution does not meet the “real-time” requirement.
Your solution: A display showing my current city name in real-time fashion. This solution does not meet the “map” requirement. What I want is not just the current section I’m working on, but what’s around me, because I may want to do some merge or reorganization with neighboring sections.
It sounds as though you want the binder selection to change every time the focus changes in the editor, but this isn’t how Scrivener works, and it’s not planned. That would result in horrible behaviour whereby if you closed a section of the binder, it would get opened again automatically just by clicking into a different editor. The UI is very deliberately left-to-right. So if you do want to find your location at any moment, you have to do it manually, by hitting Opt-Cmd-R, as Ioa suggested. This gives you what you want without breaking the functionality of the binder.
Thanks KB for your comment!
I understand your concern about the semantics of highlighting in the scrivenings mode. However, I don’t think the Opt-Cmd-R won’t create any confusion. For example, when I choose to show Section 2 in the Scrivening mode, then I move to Section 2.3 and use the shortcut Opt-Cmd-R. Now the highlighted block is moved from Section 2 to Section 2.3. So now the semantics of highlighting got overloaded.
I believe the only way to solve this issue is to introduce different indicators for different semantics: one for the root section of Scrivening mode (Section 2, in this example) and the other for the current section (Section 2.3, in this example).
Hope this proposal could be considered by the product designer.