Hi, Is there some way to go back to your previous cursor spot? I’m working with a long document. When I cut and paste to a different section, I’d like to go back to the section I cut from. Is there a way to do it automatically, without having to search for it?
Thank you so much!
Does the “Back” chevron in the editor header bar not do what you want, or am I misunderstanding?
All the best,
Keith
Cmd-[ and cmd-] walk you back and forward through the document history and the cursor should stay in the same place you left it. Does that help?
I want to go back to previous cursor spot. In other words, if I cut a section near the beginning of the document and place it somewhere near the end, I’d like to then go back to the exact spot I cut from. Is there a short cut or easy way to do this?
It would be very difficult for a computer to know which parts of what you described are meaningful, and which parts are simply navigation points generated by the act of editing. For example, when are typing in text at the bottom of the file, the cursor is creeping along from one index point to the next—that’s all technically cursor movement, but surely you wouldn’t want to have to walk back through every letter you typed. That’s an extreme and very literal example, but even if you added some complicated logic to try and weed out that kind of “navigation”, there would still be a lot of false positive in ordinary usage.
I think think the best approach here is the age old method people have been using since you could edit the text you’ve typed in: tap in something unique at your point of departure, and when you’re ready to return, search for it and hit backspace. This is very easy to do on a Mac in fact, since it has ample shortcuts for all of this:
There are more involved approaches one could take as well. If you were jumping around a lot in one document to several consistent locations, using Comments in the sidebar would be a great way of setting down little bookmarks you can click to jump to. That’s going to be more like the systems I’ve seen in some coding editors, like Vim, TextMate and everything that has copied TextMate since then: you make a little bookmark and then jump back to it later somehow.
For myself, as one who prefers automation. I have Keyboard Maestro macros that insert markers into inline annotations and other macros that hunt the markers down. Using annotations means I can leave them around for as long as I need and not worry about forgetting them and having them end up in the output.
Thank you — this sounds easy, but when I tried this method:
Type in your marker, like “@@”.
Select it and press Cmd-E.
Now move off and do whatever you need to do elsewhere in the file.
When you are ready to return, press Cmd-G, and optionally resume typing over the selected marker thus obliterating it, or hit the delete key.
It didn’t work command e doesn’t do anything and shift command e pops up an export dialogue box. Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you so much for your help —
Sorry, I should have explained which commands these are. ⌘G is of course “Find Next”, which can be used even when the ⌘F Find panel is closed. ⌘E is a handy shortcut to know about, it loads the selected text into the Find panel without opening the panel. Thus what you’re doing is telling search to get ready to look for “@@”, and so when you’re ready to return the “Find Next” command brings you back to your marker.
The command is in Edit ▸ Find ▸ Use Selection for Find. E is the Mac-wide default (this trick useful just about everywhere in native macOS software), but it can of course be overridden, either in Scrivener or globally.