As I increasingly use Scapple from within Scrivener I find myself up against the files names as when they are imported they are given a number for a name.
So, I open a scapple doc and while I am working in there I want to look at the something in another scapple doc within the project but I can’t use the recent files to find it because they are all numbers, so I don’t recognise what they are.
If I rename the scapple docs that have been imported whole (ie not an alias) into Scrivener, will Scrivener lose them? Do I just have to have them as numbers.
No biggie but a quicker workflow if I can just open from recent docs (of course, I could learn the names of the files by number … )
Those numbers are important, that is how Scrivener identifies the data (your Scapple file) with its position in the project (the Binder entry, and all of the meta-data in the Inspector). So you are correct, the OS X rename tool should not be used from within the application. I’m actually not very fond of how OS X has added the ability to rename and move files from within the document. That should always be left up to the file management utilities (be that Finder or DEVONthink or Scrivener) in my opinion, and in part because of situations like this, where data is being loaded out of other container formats.
It is safe to use versions however. Those operate “beneath” the file layer from from the viewpoint of a program like Scapple, it’s not unlike using Undo to revert data.
As you noted earlier, aliases are the way to do this if the filename itself is important for recognition on the title bar.