This is just a screenshot from SimpleNote dark mode, but it is what I still have to use in order to write. I can’t yet use Scrivener for drafting or thinking through things. I have to write everything in SimpleNote and then copy it over. Not a huge deal but there’s no rich text, so I then have to go back in and add all of the italics and take care of lists or such after I paste it into Scrivener.
Composition Mode carries an outsized importance for a lot of writers, much more so than you would think.
A workaround that I’ve found that works for me is to write in markdown in SimpleNote, then find a converter for markdown to rich text. (Does Scrivener import rich text directly?) The app previously known as Nebulous Notes also offers a great distraction free writing environment, but for me there’s nothing like SimpleNote for distraction free writing. And the sync (for back up purposes) is flawless.
What I’ve taken to doing is writing in SimpleNote, copying it over to Nebulous Notes, exporting to rich text and then copy and pasting into Scrivener. It sounds like a lot, but if I write three- or four-thousand words in Nebulous, I only have to make the transfer once.
It will do until and unless Scrivener for iOS gets a composition mode which beats out SimpleNote.
Thanks again to all who worked so hard on this great project!
First of all: Great to at last have an iOS Scrivener version! And it’s great!
If it is technically possible in iOS to make a writing screen with entirely hidden icons (like in the Mac version distraction-free composition mode) it would have been great. In fact, one KEY factor for me in choosing Scrivener on my Mac is precisely the possibility to only have text (and no icons, frames, colums, or other stuff/characters) in my writing area, my fullscreen.
Can this be done in a later version? For, if it is possible, there are no reason not to make this an option, or…?
MS Word for iPhone has a screen-reflow mode; I think that’s the closest thing to a iOS full-screen mode that Scrivener could incorporate. But I imagine that’s probably difficult because MS Word has teams of coders, and Keith has only…a few…I think.
Initially, I too was grumpy about no distraction free mode on iOS Scrivener. But lately, I’ve come to the notion that while I think a distraction-free mode is nice, if you’re distracted from your writing, you should learn to focus more on your work, and become more self-reliant, than worry about or become annoyed about whether there’s a tiny paintbrush on the corner of your screen. Some of the greatest writers in history (actually most of them considering how recent the creation of the computer is in human history) wrote without a computer altogether…
I’ll just respectfully add my vote here for an even cleaner composition mode on iPad, particularly the ability not to show the top bar with the clock and (very distracting) word count.
I’m not quite sure how this is outside the philosophy of Scrivener when such a view has been made available on the OS X version and is in fact touted in the features: “Because sometimes you want to blank out the rest of the world while you write—or at least the rest of the screen. One click in Scrivener’s toolbar and you can leave the rest of your desktop behind. […] Flexible preferences mean you can set up the full-screen mode as you please. Change documents, refer to your notes, apply keywords—or most importantly, just write—in one of the most beautiful distraction-free modes available.”
Unless it poses some significant programming challenge on iOS, which it well might, it seems like a reasonable, parallel feature for iPad users who similarly would like to leave their desktop equivalent behind!
(Also, “Scrivener isn’t a plain text app, so the formatting controls are part of the rich text editing experience” makes sense but for the fact that Markdown is an explicit option, so working in plain text is an important thing for some of us. But that has nothing to do with the most distracting top bar
You can already hide the clock and battery in full screen mode. Just tap the full screen icon in the navigation bar and the writing takes over the whole screen, the clock and batter bar is hidden, and the toolbar changes to the same colour as the text area.
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Scrivener isn’t a Markdown app, though. Users are free to use Markdown in it if they want, but Scrivener is still a rich text app. The nav bar gives you a way of bringing back the binder, ending editing, switching typewriter mode on and off, and of accessing formatting.
Chiming in - the feature that really set Scrivener apart for me, almost a decade ago when I started using it on my Mac, was the ability to enter composition mode and choose your own background image. Yes, self-control to just ignore distractions is a good thing, but the elegance and simplicity of the desktop composition mode is/was a thing of real beauty.
I’m just starting a PhD and decided to switch entirely over to an iPad Pro, partly because I saw that there was a native form of Scrivener for it. Realizing too late the lack of composition mode in the iOS version is almost heartbreaking! Those who use external keyboards (surely, anyone doing substantial writing?) could easily use a shortcut to pull formatting options back up, when desired.
I’m sure it would require extra effort to program, but seriously, if you made it a $10 in-app purchase to add on composition mode, I believe that plenty of people would spring for it. I definitely would!
Just adding my voice. I like Scrivener on iOS as well as I do on the Mac (and better than on Windows). Getting an iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard has only made it better - that iPad is now my primary computer. I do miss a true full screen / distraction free mode, though, and I imagine it can’t be that hard to implement - a number of other iOS editors have it. I, too, want it enough that I’d cheerfully pay for it.
No, of course not. I’m expressing a preference more than a serious “need.” But on the other hand, aesthetics are a lot of the appeal of Scrivener. It’s not like I can’t be productive in, say, WordStar or even (god forbid) Word. I just like Scrivener, without being able to easily distinguish between features of Scrivener that I simply like and those that provide real productivity gains. I feel like I’m a little more productive in Scrivener than I am in other software. Part of that is that it helps organize and manage long documents over the long haul, but part of it is the sense that the software stays out of my way when I want it out of my way. A real blank editor screen in iOS would help with that feeling. Other than a sophisticated built-in system for reference and citation (see Nota Bene), it’s the thing I’d like most to be added to iOS Scrivener, and would obviously be orders of magnitude simpler to implement.
A real genuine distraction-free mode would have to project me into the Mirror Dimension or come with its own sensory deprivation chamber.
I would happily accept more header/footer widgets if the real things that surround me could only be reduced to them for a while.
That Scrivener insists on Rich Text is what keeps me from using it for more than research and outlining. It gets in the way of so many uses, and in this cases it really is annoying that one of the core design problems with Scrivener (not plaintext) gets in the way of its usability.
At least as many users would be at least as annoyed if Scrivener were a plain text application. Most users will ultimately need formatted text, and don’t want to have to learn Markdown to get there.
This is the kind of statement that really baffles me. What about having rich text available to you impedes your usage of Scrivener? I’ve got plenty of coworkers who treat Word as a plain text editor (not knowing about, or refusing to use styles). They use all-upper-case titles for section headers as if the “Header 1” style wasn’t right there in the toolbar.
What’s stopping you from setting a fixed-width font as your default and ignoring italics, bold, styles, highlighting, internal or external hyper-links, footnotes, etc…? Rich text is additive; it doesn’t take anything away from text that’s available with un-formatted text.
Can’t directly use and manipulate the text in the Scrivener document with text tools while working in Scrivener. Thus I cut and paste everything to a proper text editor after research and outlining, so I can do this while I work on the document.
I used to do this: set up syncing of external folders so I could write and edit in Emacs. The text is seamlessly integrated into Scrivener — including two way translation of annotations / footnotes / white space — and in many ways it gives you the best of both worlds. If you’ve not looked at the feature, then it may be worth you exploring it in the manual.
In the end I stopped using it because the main thing I wanted was decent Vim and Emacs keyboard shortcuts and I can get that through a combination of keybindings and Karabiner Elements.
Scrivener’s editor is very proper when it comes to editing text. It’s British, after all.
By “proper text tools”, do you mean grep, awk, sed, PERL, Vi/Emacs/Pico/Nano and the like? Because the “sync with external folder” feature has a plain text option that doesn’t require cut & paste. You can then work with several documents outside of Scrivener, and then sync back into the project for further Scrivener-y manipulation.
A lack of a plain-text format for data storage is not a flaw, as you’re characterizing it; it’s a design choice. Just because it doesn’t fit your preferences doesn’t make it a mistake that needs correcting. …Unless you’ve secretly been the real mastermind behind the creation of Scrivener, and that rogue Blount defied your design specifications and has gotten away with his mischief until now.
Yes, I mean those tools. Been trying to get that to work properly with my Wine-ified Scrivener, but it’s not really playing nice. Might be the paths get weird in the translation somewhere. I’ll have to give it some more effort, but my latest markup/LaTeX project is finished so haven’t attacked the problem that much.
Any design choice can be a boon or a flaw. In this case, it gets in the way of many things, like effortless manipulation of text with external tools (though I may yet get that working properly) and, more to the point of this thread, it adds cruft to the “distraction free” writing mode. Cruft which is, well, distracting. And which in my view and use of the tool has no business being there.
Now, YMMV, and so may the intent of the designer, but that does not make the cruft any less distracting.
Some of the greatest writers in history (actually most of them considering how recent the creation of the computer is in human history) wrote without a computer altogether…
