Fullscreen button opens previous editor pane

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi–
I’m using Scrivener 3 for Mac, and I imported my preferences from Scrivener 2.

When I hit the fullscreen/composition mode button, sometimes I get the composition window I’m looking for; other times (half the time?) I get the same fade-in, but it fades in to the editor again, open on the previous document. As if I’d hit “back,” except for the fade-in.

2

That’s a pretty odd result. There shouldn’t be anything in the programming of that function, or the invocation of it via the button, that would cause the editor to go back to the previous document or escape Composition immediately.

It may be worth reinstalling the software just to make sure nothing went wrong with the installation. And also if you’re using any kind of keyboard, touch pad or macro style utilities, try leaving them turn off for a bit and see if the problem goes away. Chaining two or three actions together could be caused by something along those lines.

Also, do get the same 50%-ish rate of failure when using the View ▸ Enter Composition Mode menu command or keyboard shortcut?

3

I don’t seem to have trouble when I use the keyboard shortcut, so that’s what I’ve been doing. I wonder if it could be a lag problem; I have other odd lag on this computer, trackpad input lagging behind keyboard, etc…

Thanks!

4

Interesting that it seems to work better using another input method. To the best of my knowledge, that would really be the only difference between the two. And the other buttons seem to be working fine I take it?

I suppose general lag might account for strangenes of this nature—or rather it might be better to say, whatever is causing the lag might also be causing other odd interface quirks, too. That kind of stuff can usually be fixed with some routine troubleshooting:

  • Make sure you have enough (~15% free) disk space on the boot drive.
  • Check Activity Monitor for processes using a large amount of CPU/RAM and track them down online if you don’t recognise them—common culprits nearly always have hints online as to how to fix them.
  • Run Disk Utility first aid on all your drives and make sure none are in need of repair.
  • Finally, run a safe boot cycle to flush system caches and have everything rebuilt from the original files.

There are tools, like Maintenance that can help with some of that—checking the disks and rebuilding indices and caches.