I would like to instantly know which pane has keyboard focus

I bet I do this 25 times a day:

In binder: I make a multislection. Hit command C to copy. Paste into a another program. I paste a list of the binder items.

I click on the editor window. Key command A to select all: I have just selected all the items in the binder. ARRGGGG.

For me thie issue is that I cannot tell which pane has focus for the keyboard.

This shows up in other ways. I click on a binder item and it goes to the wrong editor window. Yeah I can lock an editor.

I go to type, and discover that looking at an editor window doesn’t move the mouse. I tyipe three words in the wrong editor window. Worse: that window had selected text, and I just replace 4 paragraphs with ‘the’. If I see it in time, command Z undoes.

What I would like:

* If there are multiple editor windows open, I want the one that will receive the next keyboard input to be visibly different. A red edge? Brighter? A flashing So in principal this could be one of several editor, quick reference, notes, comments, etc.

* If my mouse is over the binder, there is some indicator as to whether clicking which editor it will open in. e.g. the receiving editor is normal, and the otehr one is dimmed 20%

I’m not certain about any of this yet.

Both the “Binder Affects” pane and the “cursor active” pane are already highlighted.

(Granted, the highlighting can be subtle, depending on the theme you’ve chosen. Clicking around while using something like the Default theme can help show what changes to expect.)

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I’m not sure what you mean by “binder affects” pane I can’t find that string in any of the settings.
As to the difference between which editor is active. Yes, there is a subtle difference in shading in the bar that contains the name of the file currently being edited. But I have not found a place where that can be changed. This is not something that jumps out at me.

I have discovered that changing the selection in the binder affects only the editor. If your cursor was active in either a copy holder or quick reference it is no longer active there. Highlighted text from the last time you edited that doc is still selected.

This may be the reason behind my losing a the entire contents of a document once.

Navigate → Binder Selection Affects

You can also right-click on an item in the Binder to choose where it will open.

If you’re moving lots of text around, you might want to use the Documents → Split and → Merge commands. Breaking the text into a new document and moving the document is less error prone and safer than cutting and pasting.

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