Scrivener already allows me the highly intuitive option to select multiple non-contiguous blocks of text by holding down the Command key. I would like to see an addition to the Edit menu that would allow me to make such a selection of two items, then swap the two selected items in each other’s place. To give an example, consider the phrase:
With this selection, after applying an Edit menu option called Swap Non-Contiguous Text, the phrase would suddenly be rearranged to read:
“conclusion of the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years’ War, formalized by the”
This would come in handy not only for short text selections like above, but as well for entire paragraphs or sections of text. Perhaps there is already a way to do this and I am unaware of it. Does anyone else see a need for a feature like this?
Scrivener uses the standard Mac OS X text engine, and I don’t think it has that sort of function – at least, I’ve never seen it. It could probably be achieved by using Keyboard Maestro, which has a swap clipboards function (but you would have to copy each section separately, so they were each in a separate clipboard). Difficult to implement otherwise, I would think, in that you would have to tell the application where the first element ended and the second one began before they could do the swap. And then it would have to know where in the text the first and second elements came from so they could be put back in the right place. Sounds like a case for human input. If I were you, I would investigate some clipboard managers, which allow you to keep multiple clippings and select which one to paste. Look on MacUpdate where you will find a number of them.
