When opening a document, the default is to open at the end of the text/where you left off writing. I understand that a lot of people like, but it just goes against my work flow to click on a scene and see the ending of it. I’m aware of the work-around cmd+up, but it would be really nice to have the option to turn on a default “open at the beginning.”
I believe it actually (pre)scrolls to where you left the cursor last time you’ve worked on that document.
(I am not commenting on the request. I am just saying Scrivener is not actually showing the bottom, but the last known cursor position.)
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Believe page up key in windows gets you to the top in smaller files but rapidily moves you up in larger documents. But I would assume you default choice would be to resume where you left off, not start at the beginning. But having the option to do so could be helpful.
I feel your need here, and have wanted something similar myself for years. Not when I am writing, but when I am editing. Thing is, there is something that will do this already, details at the bottom.
I think I’d rather have a UI button to “scroll to top” (and “scroll to bottom” for parity). Which would solve your request and other user desires like this one from 2018.
You are running into an hidden problem common with all mature software packages like Scrivener. Years of muscle memory the developers have in their tools, as well as the customers who have been around for a long time. Changing the default behavior is typically avoided like the plague and only put into practice when underlying changes force it.
While considering my words for this post I was certain there was already a way to easily do what you want. I went looking for a list of commands that one can get on iPadOS by holding Control and Command together for a few moments. There isn’t a clear index of shortcuts like that in MacOS Scrivener.
The function I remember is baked into MacOS itself and not a Scrivener construct.
- Command + Up Arrow zooms to the top of the active document
- Command + Down Arrow zooms to the bottom.
- Command + PageUp/PageDown scrolls one screen’s worth.
The entire and exhaustive list of shortcuts can be found here, though here is a link that goes directly to the Text Document section where the above can be found.
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And these are also documented in the user manual, § 15.2.1, Caret Movement and Selection, where Windows users can find the standard shortcuts on that system.
In this case, it has very little to do with being concerned about changing something that has inertia, and more to do with how this only comes up every rare once in a while, and there being sound and good reasons for it working the way it does. This behaviour in particular follows the design principle of avoiding cluttering the interface with options when you can provide the most difficult to achieve solution in a fashion that allows the most desired alternative behaviours to be easily achieved.
Or to put it into this particular case: the very difficult thing to do is remember where you were in a section of text three days ago, or even two minutes ago, if you’re bouncing around between sections. That demands of you a lot of awareness and mental energy that software can instead do very easily for you. If you can’t keep up, it means a lot of manual labour, putting inline annotation “STOP” markers into the text.
Navigating to the top or bottom of the document, on the other hand, is something everyone can do for themselves, just like they would in most all software, with two simple and easy to remember shortcuts—or lacking that, a quick click on the scrollbar at the bottom or top. No variances in the behaviour, no unpredictability, no scanning around and reading through the text, no squinting at phrases you feel are unfamiliar but feel shouldn’t be, just enter document + shortcut. Works the same way every single time.
Another example that comes up rarely now and then is us printing your name and the current date and time into a new comment, with it preselected. There are no settings for that, or to turn it off, but the hard part is already done. If you don’t want the hard part you just start typing and it overwrites.
Not when I am writing, but when I am editing.
That’s interesting, for me if anything it would be the opposite. While writing I would be more inclined to always want the cursor at the end (why the top?), but with editing it would be a massive pain (again with the STOP markers everywhere) without the cursor sticking where I left it.
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The only windows movement commands are Ctrl + Home (top of the page) and Ctrl + End to the bottom of a page which are windows based and work in Scrivener.
At the risk of hijacking the topic I’ll explain, both what I’d want and why I don’t think it would work for very many Scrivener Users.
When I’m FIRST going into EDITING mode, I’d want documents to open with the carat at the top of the document. If I’m returning to an EDIT-IN-PROGRESS I want to return to where I was.
The thing is Scrivener doesn’t have operation modes like Affinity’s Personas. If it did, then keeping up with a carat placeholder for each mode might make sense.
As for having "Affinity Persona style modes in Scrivener, I don’t see enough people finding enough benefit to justify the complexity it would inject into a software suite that already has a somewhat high learning curve as it is.
I might wish it did have the separate modes, but I can see that it would be more trouble that it’s worth. To whit, I don’t expect that it would be popular enough to implement, to say nothing of the myriad of support calls when users are in EDIT mode and are trying to create new chapters or other aspects unique to the WRITE mode and vice-versa.
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Exactly, it’s an excellent tool in these professional design programs, but I think it would maybe be a bit much for Scrivener. Even though it certainly is aiming a bit more toward that level of proficiency than other things, and we don’t deny it’s more on the “workstation” side of the equation than “app”—still, it might be a bit much.
Interesting aside though: there was a writing program that did try having distinct interfaces and behaviours for the phases of a writing project, called AI Writer. From what I understand it didn’t really take off though and is no longer a thing in it (I could easily be wrong, I haven’t really kept tabs on it since it originally came out).
The closet things to modes in Scrivener is the ability to save preference sets as Presets, with the Manage button in the settings, lower left. I’ve never actually used it in that capacity as my preferences for using the software tend to not really change much depending on what I’m doing, but I do use them to save my own personal setup vs defaults, which I often need when answering questions and formulating checklists—as my settings are way off of default.
I do think that’s probably the closest we should come to that, letting you you decide what editing means, into a preset, rather than hard-coding things. That’s the point I was trying to get at, in how to me editing is a very navigation-heavy process most of the time because my sections are quite short (I outline to a very detailed degree), and it’s often more about—oh, this is wrong, that impacts 15 other things—than just going through one chapter to the next from top to bottom and rewriting. When I do that, Ctrl+Home / Cmd-UpArrow is okay.
Nerd alert...
So if someone really wanted to reset their project for a “top down” editing session, you could actually do that without too much effort, so long as you have a decent text editor that can run regular expressions.
- Firstly, use
File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To...to make a copy before doing any of this. Not a bad idea to make a pre-edit backup milestone anyway, but it’s always a good idea when messing with project XML. - Select a group and switch to Corkboard mode. You don’t want to be viewing a text file as there are UI state-saving routines that go beyond the hard cursor setting in the project itself. Close the project.
- On a Mac, right-click on the project in Finder and select “Show Package Contents”. On Windows, just drill into the main project folder.
- Open the “projectname.scrivx” file in a text editor.
- Replace
<TextSelection>\d+\,\d+</TextSelection>with Regex mode enabled, to<TextSelection>0,0</TextSelection>. - Save, and load your project.
Everything will now be reset so the cursor starts at the very front of the file.
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