Apologies if this is asked for/questioned somewhere, but what I found searching the forums mostly asks for resizing summary windows, making the Inspector pane larger, etc.
I would like the ability to decrease its minimum size. (And if this is actually possible through another way than just dragging the border line, please let me know!)
Yes, vertical repositioning of the index card summary would be great (much like in the way you can resize Photoshop toolbars, eliminate empty space you don’t use with something useful (i.e., I rarely use “document notes”)), but mostly, I feel like the entire Inspector pane is too wide for my setup and gets in the way. I don’t have such an abundance of info that it needs to be so large (“so large” being a relative term, of course), but with important info that I don’t want to have it closed all the time.
The Binder doesn’t have a minimum size, so I’m not sure why the Inspector pane does. Obviously, at this point, it would make the index card smaller to retain its ratio, but having the option to have to deal with that would be nice! :mrgreen:
I may not be following what you mean by minimum size, as the Binder sidebar most certainly does have one (at least in how I’m thinking of it). If you drag the splitter on the Binder and move it left, there will be a point where you can’t go any further (about an inch on my screen). The Inspector can’t get any smaller because of the number of buttons and controls within it.
Have you tried Full Screen mode yet? I don’t use it much myself, but there is one thing about Scrivener’s Full Screen implementation that I really like on smaller monitors (like this MacBook Air 11" I’m typing on) and that is the option to hide the Inspector and Binder sidebars initially, and then use them as slide-outs on the edges of the screen instead of fixed panels in the project window. You should be able to slide your mouse to the right to bring it up, or hit any of the shortcuts used to reveal components of the Inspector. For example Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-I will reveal the index card, and pressing the shortcut a second time will move your cursor there so you can work with the synopsis. Use the editor focus command, Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-E to return (or of course you can just click around with the mouse, too).
We don’t have any plans to copy Adobe’s modular palette and toolbar system though, that’s all rather complicated in that it would require hand-coding the entire thing, there is nothing like that in the Mac development toolkit (Adobe uses their own home-brewed user interface foundation—the likes of which is a bit out of our budget).
Nope, you’re right, the Binder does have a minimum…I just didn’t push it THAT far over haha. So, yes, that is what I’m talking about…and the Inspector’s minimum is far, far wider than that.
I get that there are a lot of buttons that may currently prevent it from going smaller (and I’m not talking much, maybe a quarter of an inch), but the only ones that issue seems to apply to are the “General” panel info…and there’s a considerable amount of space between the info in even the longest “button,” the “created” one.
I totally get not fiddling with the rest of the pane: while nice, that would take an obscene amount of coding.
Full-screen mode as you detail doesn’t fix the issue for me, because I need that pane open while scrolling through research, marking up keywords, inserting metadata, etc. It wasn’t a problem before today because I deliberately set my laptop resolution smaller (literally, JUST to decrease the size of the inspector pane), but I realized that was making my entire computer lag. So I set it back to default, and now the pane size is an issue again.
Something we have to consider with the design is all of the available labels, as well as giving enough room for you to use longer labels in the customisable areas. What may look like a lot of space in English ends up getting chewed up by German labels, for instance. Plus there is a deliberate amount of free-space for the label/status area so that you can use longer custom names for these meta-data fields if you wish.
In the future this may be easier to deal with. Right now we are using an older method for laying out the interface that requires everything to be positioned in a static fashion. You design the UI kind of like you would draft something in CAD or Illustrator, it’s a bit rigid. There are modern methods that we’ll be switching over to in time, and maybe a narrowing Inspector will be possible in some configurations as a result. I can’t promise anything though.
Meanwhile, can you close the Binder to give yourself more space? That is what I often do, I alternate between them (especially if I want to use vertical splits), and since you can load up large chunks of the Binder into an Outliner split, and since it is easy to “flip through” the whole list one by one with those up/down arrow buttons on the editor header bar, I find I often don’t need the Binder open, and can just leave it closed until I need it briefly.
If I’m reading this right, the reason you need the inspector is to add keywords, custom metadata, and other per-document information that isn’t the document notes (which you’ve stated you don’t need/use). If that’s the case, can you make do with splitting the editor and dedicating one of those splits to the outline mode? You can add keyword, custom metadata, synopses, labels, and status columns to the outliner and add to or change those values in the outline.
My first thought was, “Hmm, that’s an intriguing idea…let me try that!” And then I did…and the split view minimum is wider than the Inspector minimum haha. Good thought though.
So, alas, no. Doesn’t fix the problem. Sad.
Edit: Didn’t see AmberV’s reply above, the original here was for rdale.
Thank you for the workaround ideas, but that’s all they are. Workarounds that don’t elegantly or conveniently fit in with my workflow, which is a shame just for want of a slightly narrower Inspector pane. I actually don’t like working in full-screen mode (or with either or both panes turned off, because then my document isn’t centered and extends too far out to the sides. (I may have a few aesthetic quirks I’ve picked up from working a ton in Lightroom ).
So, if at any point in the future, this is on the table for discussion, count my vote in! I’d greatly appreciate it…but it won’t stop me from using Scrivener. I’ll just sigh and groan a little when I do haha.
Actually…is there any way to turn on the side panes in compose mode? I can get the paper width I want there, and then when I needed the Binder or Inspector, I could just bring it up temporarily. Don’t know if this is possible; I’ve yet seen a way to do it. Just a thought! (Yeah, what it comes down to is that I like a little side-border on my workspace, but not too much.)
Not sure about the binder, but you can see the Inspector panels in Compose mode with the usual shortcut of cmd-opt-i. This will bring up a small HUD (not the normal Inspector), which you can move around the screen. The cmd-opt-ctl-h, -n, -j etc shortcuts will run through the panels as you’d expect. I don’t know whether the minimum width will be more acceptable to you, but the fact that it’s a simple cmd-opt-i toggle away which doesn’t affect the compose mode text layout may help.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that it would solve the “not narrow enough” issue. But if you split horizontally (with the outliner above or below the other editor), then you can have all the width of the screen to work with. You do lose a little of the vertical space, but if you only need to see one document’s metadata at a time, then you can squeeze that split to a very short sliver of your editor space. If you let the full screen mode hide the toolbar, that more than makes up for it.
Note that the drawback is that you have to select the document in the binder, and have the appropriate View->Binder affects setting selected. But you can then set it so that clicking on the outliner row brings up the document in the other editor. As far as I know, you can’t select a document and have the outliner scroll to the document there.
Obviously not the perfect solution, but I wanted to make sure you considered the horizontal split before giving up on the concept.
Thanks, that may be a decent workaround…and I typically work with vertical split screen only, so I had forgotten about trying this in horizontal mode haha. Thanks for clarifying!
And I clearly need to start learning shortcuts for things; looks like that will make life a lot easier (with bringing out the binder and inspector panes sans toolbar).
Last question: is there a shortcut or a way to create a shortcut to bring out the toolbar? Or is that only accessible in the menu? Doing this horizontal split view thing works best in full-screen mode with no toolbar, but occasionally I need access to all the things. A keyboard shortcut would come in handy.
The latter, yes. That’s just a function of your Mac though, most menu commands can have a shortcut attached to them (or the originals altered). We have a how-to on making custom shortcuts.
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