I write my texts across three different laptops - a small one, a medium-size one, and a large one (I guess if Goldilocks would ever get IT equipment for her three bears, this is what she’d pick).
By default, Scrivener keeps layout settings for each document - for me, however, this is not ideal, since I need bare-bones features on my small screen, while I enjoy the luxury of more toolbars and whatnot on the bigger one. Is it somehow possible to make sure that the layout stays the same on each individual machine, regardless of which document I load?
The layout setting is saved in the project itself, so it’s not possible to make each computer use a different layout for the project by default, but you can use the layout manager (View > Layout > Manage Layouts) to save your preferred layout on each machine and then quickly switch to that when you open the project. The layouts saved here will be saved locally on the machine, which is fine in this case since you want different ones on each computer anyway. To make switching layouts easier, you can also add the Manage Layouts button to the main toolbar on each machine (Tools > Customize Toolbar).
Well the problem with that I use the toolbar on none of my computers, and if I switch computers in rapid succession, it can actually be quite annoying to reset the layout each and every time.
Simply talking about workflow here - having to re-establish the correct workplace settings nearly every time I start writing feels a bit like rolling the same stone up a hill over and over again.
Ah yeah, if you hide the toolbar adding the button won’t help much. Since there’s no keyboard shortcut for this yet, you’d have to go through the menu then, although you can avoid opening the layout manager after you’ve created the layout and just choose it from the All Layouts list in the menu. We may be able to add a shortcut later to also flip through layouts or the ability to assign one directly via a shortcut, though I’m not sure on that. It’s doable on a Mac because it’s all handled via the OS system, which allows you to manually assign shortcuts to unique menu commands per program or globally, but since on Windows this is all custom code in Scrivener, it will have to be done a bit differently and I don’t know if it will be possible to add shortcuts for user-defined menu names. Something we can look at, though.
As far as computer-specific layout options, maybe it’s something we can look at for a later version down the road; I’m not sure how difficult it would be. The layouts would still all need to be saved in the project package, identifying the computer they belonged to, and then when opening, Scrivener would need to find and use the correct one, or find one to use if there is no correct one, as when opening on a new computer. We’ll see!
Well, on the user end of course it would be most convenient to save a single default layout on each computer (which can then be applied to ALL projects, without having to rebuild for each new one). If that’s technically unfeasible, maybe you could save the per-project default layout names on each computer (to be loaded from the respecitive project package) - imho at least it would seem easier than going the other way round and having the project identify the computers. But either way, if you can come up with anything that allows for different defaults on different machines, that would be fantastic!
Since there’s no keyboard shortcut for this yet, you’d have to go through the menu then, although you can avoid opening the layout manager after you’ve created the layout and just choose it from the All Layouts list in the menu. We may be able to add a shortcut later to also flip through layouts or the ability to assign one directly via a shortcut, though I’m not sure on that. It’s doable on a Mac because it’s all handled via the OS system, which allows you to manually assign shortcuts to unique menu commands per program or globally, but since on Windows this is all custom code in Scrivener, it will have to be done a bit differently and I don’t know if it will be possible to add shortcuts for user-defined menu names. Something we can look at, though.