I’m new to this whole beta-business, so my apologies if I’m doing something wrong by posting this here. However, I noticed, that if I wanted to enter keywords on all the (unkeyworded) scenes (a ton of those) through the inspector, it was very tedious to always click on the keywords -editor. I saw this icon titled “lock inspector to current editor”, and thought it would make it so that upon selecting a new scene the editor would remain in the “Keywords” mode. I clicked it, selected another scene on the cardboard, but instead got the usual “Notes” editor. I’ve got the latest version of Scrivener, and am running Windows Vista.
“Lock inspector to editor” is for when you’re using a split editor. Normally, the inspector will show the meta-data for the document of whichever editor is in focus. Locking the inspector causes it to not switch editors, so if you lock it while your focus is on the right editor in a vertical split, for instance, when you move your focus to the left editor to work, the inspector continues to show the meta-data for the document displayed in the right editor. If there’s only a single editor open, the “lock” button doesn’t really do anything, since it’s always displaying the info for that editor anyway.
Keep in mind this is tying the inspector to the editor, not to a particular document. If you load a different document in the editor to which the inspector is locked, the appropriate meta-data for that new document will appear in the inspector.
I’m not entirely clear how your editor, binder, and inspector are set up right now and how you’re working. If you’ve switched the inspector to show the keywords panel, it should remember that setting even when you switch to another document, and so still be showing you the keywords for that new document. Locking the inspector doesn’t affect this, it’s just how the inspector is set up.
There is a small bug with 035 where if you switch from viewing a single document to viewing a special folder–Draft, Research, or Trash–that only shows project references or project notes in the inspector, the inspector will switch to show this; when you click back in a document, it should return to the view you previously had, but in 035 it will revert to notes or references. This was fixed in the NaNoWriMo trial, so you could try downloading and installing that (the page is here), or there will be a new standard update shortly which will include this fix.
If something else entirely is happening, could you post a screenshot and run through step by step what you’re doing and where it goes wrong?
Oh, I think I’ve completely misunderstood what that feature was supposed to do. I thought it was supposed to keep the Inspector in one of the “Notes”/“References”/“Keywords”/“Snapshots” stages. There’s no other way to do that, is there? And, related to my original problem, is there a way to mass-add keywords to scenes (add the same keyword to a lot of scenes at once)?
I’m sorry for this misunderstanding! ):
Yes, to the original problem, you can select multiple items in the binder (Ctrl-click, or Shift-click to select ranges) and then drag one or more keywords from the project keywords window to assign multiple ad hoc keywords to an ad hoc selection. This doesn’t yet work on the corkboard or outliner; you have to use the binder.
No, but it shouldn’t be an issue because the inspector shouldn’t change these on you unless you switch to a document that doesn’t support that particular feature–e.g. PDFs can’t have snapshots, so if you’re viewing snapshots on a text document and then load a PDF, you’ll be switched to notes. When you load another text document, the inspector will remember that you had wanted to be viewing snapshots, so it will jump back to that for you. That last part isn’t happening now in 035, but it is fixed for the next release. It should be working in 035 though to stay on the appropriate pane as long as you don’t load a document type that doesn’t support the feature. Everything supports keywords except Draft, Research, and Trash, so in general you should be okay with this. If you’re constantly going back to your complete Draft folder on the corkboard, though, that’s probably why it’s jumping for you. You might want to try using a split editor and linking the two (click the double-arrow button in the footer of the corkboard editor) so that when you click an index card that document will load in the second editor. You can then lock the inspector on that second editor, and even when you jump back to the corkboard to move around and load a new document, you won’t get bumped out of keywords.
Awesome, your advice worked. 
I was indeed going back to the Draft folder’s corkboard, so it was hopping back to “Notes” all the time. Thank you very much for the help!