If I have two editors visible, the right one locked and showing an outliner, the left just showing a document…
and I hide the right one, leaving only the left editor, when I then bring the right editor back, the view has changed. It is no longer locked and now displays the same document that the left editor does.
Is this expected behaviour? Is there anything I can do to prevent it, so that temporarily hiding a locked editor doesn’t lose its outliner view?
Thanks in advance,
David
Yes, this is expected behaviour, when you close a split you are “destroying” that session, and any temporary aspects of that session, such as which document you were viewing are dismissed.
Do note however that there are things which are not session specific, such as document viewing history. If you bring up your split again after half a day of not using it, sure you won’t be seeing the document you were working with in it—but you can very simply just click the “Back” button in the header bar to return to where you were.
It’s a bit arbitrary, but you have to balance what you are trying to do with other scenarios—for example one might have closed the split weeks ago and just wanted to use it to scroll up to a higher position in the document they are editing, but instead this outliner from a week ago (or worse, a huge Scrivenings session that takes some seconds to assemble) loads, and how do you get the current document you were editing into the pane easily—it might not even be visible in the Binder at the moment. The current behaviour makes your workflow easy enough—just hit a button to get back to where you were, and meanwhile it makes a fresh usage of the split feature easy as well.
Thanks for the response and the explanation. I agree that it might be frustrating to find a large scrivenings session reloading itself unexpectedly…
… it’s also the case that one of the scrivener’s strengths is its usability on small screens. I work both on a 24" monitor, and on an 11" netbook, and it is equally usable on both of them. In the latter case the easy usability really depends on being able to quickly and easily hide and unhide panels and editors, and it would be nice to be able to choose to retain the previously-displayed session.
Maybe quickly stepping back in the editor’s history will become second nature after a bit of practice though! 
Cheers
Just want to note that David’s suggestion was for a variant behavior when a locked editor pane is hidden and revealed. Routine splitting behavior would be unchanged. It’s not a need I’ve encountered, but I think there’s an excellent case for respecting that lock, to enable the quick toggling of a secondary document or, indeed, a Scrivenings view.
Rgds – Jerome
Perhaps a solution would be to have a global option along the lines of ‘locked editor remembers session’, which could be toggled on or off. Then users for whom it is not useful could keep the current behaviour—while those who need it (eg users with small screens) could choose (at their own risk!) to have locked editors retain their view.
And as Jerome points out, there is no reason why this would mean that an unlocked editor need retain its session after being hidden.
David
That exclusion does make a kind of sense, to strengthen the lock behaviour to include even cases where it may not be visible. We’ll give it some thought, thanks!
Another tip for small screens, if you aren’t already doing so, is to dispense with the Binder if you aren’t using it (and there are many ways to get around that don’t involve using it). Getting used that Ctrl-Shift-B shortcut is a great way to reclaim a pretty nice chunk of screen space when you need it.