Welcome to Scrivener! A few comments on some of your queries and suggestions:
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Custom metadata per item: that isn’t something in the cards for now. What you are describing is a level of uncommon usage, where I agree, you would benefit, but for the most part those that use this feature don’t have so many fields that it becomes a problem. I don’t think of the feature as being a database-style form (where one has no limits and is thus encouraged to break every little tiny detail out into separate fields) because that’s really not what it is. Rather, it is more along the lines of: have I exhausted every other possible mechanism in the software? If yes, then I create a field. Consequently even in fairly complex projects I tend to only have half a dozen or so, and it really doesn’t matter if some of six aren’t relevant to what I’m working with at the moment.
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Some things don’t need fields in a program where you can target searches directly at certain areas of the interface. Coupled with simple conventions in how you type things in, these targeted searches can become as precise as fields. Document Notes for example is a great place for stuffing detail into an item that is visible at the organisational level, and of course the synopsis and even title itself can be useful places to indicate important details. It all depends on what you need of a detail. Are you really going to ever need to find a characters by their eye colour? Maybe so—but for me that wouldn’t ever be something I would need to know like that, it’s something I would want to record so I don’t forget and screw up the descriptions over time—so for a detail like that Notes is perfect, or even the main content area. Look for how you use data, and organise it accordingly. There are lots of useful places to slip folded up pieces of paper into the cracks, in Scrivener, not just custom metadata fields!
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And to come back to the point of making general text entry areas precise: consider how you can use convention to codify information. Even something as simple and human-friendly as “Eye Colour: Brown”, can become a very precise search, and with the ability to use regular expressions it can even be a fuzzy search. For example, this would find all characters with blue or brown eyes:
Eye Colour: (Brown|Blue) -
You might consider alternatives for some of these things, like Keywords, which are great for housing large repositories of repetitively used data that needn’t all be associated. You can group them as well, further facilitating that approach.
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In a similar vein, I will sometimes use a form of “overloading” for fields. The Label in particular is very useful for this because it can be used to apply a colour to items in almost every context (especially with the icon tint setting). So sometimes I’ll use Label for multiple purposes, if those purposes never overlap for one item. For example, your character sheets might use labels for plot importance, and your locations might use it for geographical region. All of the values are in the same dropdown, so that gets longer, but you only have one field at a particular access point.
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Searching for metadata: this is already possible, but maybe you’re using the quick navigation tool in the toolbar instead of the full-blown project search? The more powerful search opens up above the binder sidebar (I used
Ctrl+Shift+F), and the magnifying glass icon to the left of the search field has a lot of options—like specific field searching, and saving searches for future recall.Regarding those search results, you aren’t limited to the binder sidebar either. Click the hook arrow button in the search results header bar to load the results into the active main editor split. That trick works for collections and so forth, too. Note you can also right-click in the editor header bar icon to navigate the editor straight to collections as well.
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Bookmarks aren’t backlinks: depends on your priorities I suppose. Myself I find dynamically generated lists that are editable to be extremely useful. You can skip the manual effort in building them, but aren’t a slave to that algorithm going forward—you can weed out bad results, or things that become irrelevant over time.
- As for seeing where a thing is in the project though, you should already be able to do that with the Reveal in Binder command.
- Can’t really help on the “why” problem though, there used to be a nice description field here, but that was taken out of the design. Now you just kind of have to know why you linked to something, or if the software did it for you—and for those that use them a lot, I would say it does suffer from a lack of self-description.
- For that reason, in more complex projects I sometimes find myself keeping link lists in Document Notes, because there I can annotate them to my heart’s content. It should be possible to select the bookmarks and copy and paste them into Notes—not sure if that is implemented in the beta version for Windows yet. The approach has its downsides—the Bookmark sidebar is extremely useful for what it does and you do lose some of that, but if the need to annotate trumps the ability to click and view the target link, it could be worth it.
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Freeform corkboards already exist: the button is in the footer area on the right hand side. While there, you might as well check out the label view as well—it’s another tool to consider when deciding what kind of data to put on the label!
- No plans for lines between linkages. That’s bordering on the definition of bloat I would say, since any mere simple implementation of it would be unsatisfactory to most. It’s exactly the kind of feature that doesn’t stop satisfying a feature request, but rather piles on loads of new ones: “can we have line types?” “what about labels?” “there are too many of them, I need a way to highlight the ones between the selected cards”, “I don’t want lines for all of them, just some of them, I need a filter”… i.e. this is a feature set some software dedicates most of their not inconsiderably complex codebase to!
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Keywords as Printed Text: the setting for that is right in the outliner columns setup menu. It’s a sub-checkbox under the keywords column checkbox itself. Nested settings like that change how the column works.
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Undo: of course if it were technically possible to do all of that it would make sense to. Meanwhile, no amount of software level protection is going to stop the threat of serious damage. Nobody should be flying without multiple backup systems in this day and age, with so many cheap backup solutions and robust OS level systems out there, the go to answer to anything like this should be to fire layer one up and recover from that—and if that fails fire up layer two. Read up on Scrivener’s automated backup system in the user manual. It is designed to couple nicely with automated backup systems, as well as cloud tools (though be careful with those since they are often two-way).
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Comments: we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. The main problem with your request can be summed up by one question: what margin?
But for a much more detailed analysis and discussion, I would refer you to this thread, and a later follow-up, where I itemise and describe what I feel to be the clear advantages of Scrivener’s two-method notation system: inline and sidebar.