I don’t mean to take away from the good conversation on using file system tools and additional software to augment the scratch pad. It is meant to be an integrated tool given how it works on a folder of regular old files, and for most things you might want to do beyond what it does, using other tools is the right answer.
That said, ever since Scrivener 3 made functional improvements to the utility of a simplified project window, I’ve stopped using the scratch pad entirely. Why use an intentionally simplified thing that only does one thing, when you can do that, and do everything a project can do?
Now that more recent versions of macOS have broken the toolkit we were using keep files in real-time sync with the disk, there isn’t anything the scratch pad can do that a project window cannot.
A few ideas for what a project window can do: searching through notes (there is ⌘F in the top list view, as well as Quick Search, or even Project Search if you want to get hardcore), tagging notes with labels and keywords, full text writing and revisioning tools, annotating notes with a synopsis, interlinking them, archival to “hidden” folders, a proper trash system &c.
Over the years people have asked us to add more and more into the scratch pad, but really the things that get asked for are things that already exist, and that would if implemented only serve to make the scratch pad less unique, and more like this…
- Scratch Pad Project Template-Win.zip (108.3 KB)
- Scratch Pad Project Template-Mac.zip (127.5 KB)