I’m attempting to organize one of my project binders more efficiently (read, I’m procrastinating on writing), and I’ve hit a block. Is it possible to run a search and have a folder or document stack’s entire contents show up? Idea being you label the folder, put some keywords in it, title it something significant, then when you run a search it will bring up everything in the folder.
An alternative would be if there’s a quick “apply to all subdocuments” sort of labeling or keyword adding scheme (aside from selecting multiple documents and applying a label—I’m thinking something that automatically updates any new subdocuments added), but it’d be nice to be able to use the folder to collect the large, generic identifiers and then keep the individual documents uncluttered for more refined terms. Example: All my character folders could be labeled “character” in some way, but I don’t want to label all the individual documents as “character,” I want to label them as “emotional development” or “physical description” or whatever. Keywords could obviously use both, but it could easily get cluttered that way, and if I always title character folders with “CHAR: [name]” it would be easy to just do a search for “CHAR:”.
Yes, the main problem with using searches that return results that don’t actually match is that not everyone is using the outliner and meta-data the same way you are. Consider for example, someone who has a “Chapter” label type. They apply that to twelve top-level items but leave the children items alone for a while since that is still in the process of formation. If a project search for “chapter” returned a bunch of partial scenes because they are children of a chapter, that would be confusing at the worst, or just annoying because search is suddenly no longer strictly relevant and is filled with a lot of chaff you have to hunt through.
So cascading meta-data has issues since not all Scrivener usage of meta-data is conceptually cascading. In fact, I would say in most cases it rarely is, and in cases where it could be, it would be quite complicated to define how that is meant to work since some would want it to work in inverse cascade. Example: you marked ten scenes as complete and want the chapter container to automatically inherit “complete” as well. It would take a lot of interface and documentation to create a flexible system of automation when in most cases it’s easier to just mark the chapter container as complete. Yeah, you have to do it, but you do that maybe thirty times over the course of a half-year or more with a total accumulated effort that would probably be less than trying to figure out some complicated procedural inheritance system once.
Points taken about the difficulty and confusion. I had a vague idea that folders and subdocuments might act differently (unless checked otherwise in the preferences) and that it would potentially lessen the confusion, so it seemed it could be possible and I just hadn’t figured it out. But I can definitely see that it might not be beneficial in perhaps the majority of circumstances, so it’s just my current scenario and I’ll just work around it. The three pane set up going Binder>Outliner>Document will probably work most of the time anyway; I was just being fussy because I like the visual in the binder/search and having both editor panes free for action.
The setting you are referring to (in Navigation preferences) is more about Navigation (not to be silly). It alters the way folders and documents-with-subdocuments react when you click on them in the Binder, but it also impacts other small details here and there as well. Since in this particular case, search results don’t do anything special with folders anyway, none of the settings there would modify the base behaviour. So hopefully that saves you some time hunting around.
Definitely understand that! You can compress things a little bit. If your primary meta-data is the label, you could try working with “Tint Icons with Label Color” enabled in the View menu. This will move label info up into the Binder. In other words, if you are just using Outliner to reconnoitre label conditions, you could move that into Binder and keep both splits free for writing. This is one of the reasons why Label is the most pervasive and flexible meta-data field in the application, right behind the Title. Using either of those strategically can reap a lot of benefit in interface simplicity.
Using either of those strategically can reap a lot of benefit in interface simplicity.