Feelings and questions/suggestions

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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I’ve never owned a mac, though I very, very much would like one day to get one. For now, I’m stuck on a vista, and always found myself dreamily staring at programs like Oomwriter and scrivener, wondering when those beautiful programs would ever reach my grasp. So I’m obviously very excited to be trying out Scrivener beta now!
First impressions have been great! With the help of the starting video I’ve gotten the hang of the basics, and so far, have yet to encounter any serious bugs. I’m really looking foreward to writing this year’s NaNo with Scrivener!

However, I do have a couple of suggestions. I don’t know how doable these are, and some of these problems might be minor bugs (I’m not sure). All in all, the program seems great, but there are a couple of things that are just annoying - little busywork I don’t want to bother with during a hectic November.

The Ruler
I don’t know if I don’t know how to use this, or if it just sucks. This is what I’ve been struggling with: I just want each new paragraph to space (right word to use? Not a native english-speaker here) a little in automatically. Simple enough, I thought. However, the ruler has a nasty habit of resetting itself every time my attention strays - it resets (both arrows to 0) when I reopen my project, or sometimes (but not always) when I switch scenes. Also, having the ruler unique for each scene gives me a hard time, since if it happens to reset, I have to adjust it for every scene in my book that I want to write! Without the spacing the text is harder to read and looks much too cluttered - what I’d love to see is a truly automatic space whenever a new paragraph is started, similar to how yWriter does it.

Folders
I’m a very visual person (why I ended up downloading Scrivener in the first place), especially while navigating or planning. I’d really like it if there’d be an option to change the colours of the little folder icons in the binder - it would allow me to easily see what to click without reading the folder names. This is a really minor thing, but in the long run it would make working faster and smoother.

Anyway, thank you guys so much for giving us Windows -people the chance to use Scrivener! (: It’s looking awesome so far.

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Hi mephetti,

Thanks for the kind words. I’m the Mac developer and I’m just trying to help out a little given that Lee is snowed under, so I can’t answer specific Windows code-problem questions, but I can answer a couple of parts of your queries:

  1. I believe there are still bugs lurking in the ruler and formatting in general that Lee is working on. (The visuals of the ruler will be improved, too - they currently blend into the header bar but shouldn’t.) However, you don’t have to set up your preferred settings for every document. If you open the Options panel (from the Edit menu) and then use the arrows to find the Editor options, you can set the formatting you want to use as the default for each new document. Essentially, that allows you to choose the formatting you want to use normally, and then the ruler in the editor allows you to override that when you need to.

  2. Folders colours: This is already on the list, as it’s something that Scrivener 1.x for the Mac can do. It’s not implemented yet, but before release you should be able to set it so that documents use their label colour. Then, further off in the future - after 1.0 - you’ll eventually even be able to assign custom icons, which is a 2.0 for the Mac feature. As I say, custom icons is an off-in-the-future thing for the Windows version, but in the long run all these things will be coming.

Thanks again and all the best,
Keith