I drop by the apple downloads page from time to time and I usually see at least one writing program. I think I tried ten out before I found scrivener and now I don’t even both to try out any of the others. I’m in love with Scrivener. I don’t believe I’ll ever use anything else, ever!
I love it the most because when writing a story I can break chapters into scenes and label each scene, I can find anything within my writing no matter what the length of the story. And I just love the cork board look, the index cards, and the full screen option. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic!!!
Scrivener is a great programme! I’m a novelist (literary fiction - check me out on amazon/books, alcemi.eu, Google etc) and I’m using it for the book I’m currently working on. It would be nice to have a dictionary, so long as it was a really good one. Don’t know if that’s feasible.
All the best
Hi Chris, thanks for the kind words. As Jaysen says, Scrivener uses the standard OS X dictionary. There are two ways of accessing it (which goes for most Cocoa programs, too): select a word and ctrl-click on it, then select “Look Up in Dictionary”; or, place the cursor over the word you wish to look up and hit ctrl-cmd-D, which brings up the definition in place. Scrivener 2.0 will make this command available from the Edit menu, too.
All the best,
Keith
You know one thing that really threw me about the ctrl-cmd-D thing? You get the dictionary/thesaurus entry for the word your mouse cursor is over, not your editing cursor. This threw me badly when I first started using Scrivener because (and I know this is Apple’s behaviour, not Scrivener’s) it’s downright stupid. If you’re editing it’s the editing cursor that matters and it should check what’s there, not wherever your mouse happens to be. Or to put it differently you shouldn’t have to float your mouse over the screen to check a word. You don’t in Word and for once MS are right and Apple are wrong.
There. That’s off my chest now. It’s OK Keith - I know this is nothing to do with you.
PS. If you want to know how rare the ‘Microsoft is right thing is’ I suggest people go to youtube and type in ‘songsmith’ to see what Microsoft’s new music software makes of some classic songs when played through it.
If you want to do dictionary look-ups by cursor instead of mouse selection, bind Cmd-Ctrl-D to the Look Up in Dictionary global service command. Note you’ll have to select the word you wish to look up, and it will load it in the full interface, but at least you needn’t reach for the mouse to get a definition.
Aha! Er, so how do you actually bind the key to the service as Amber suggests? I looked in Sys Prefs and you only seem to be able to set keys to actually applications?
In System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse, under the “Keyboard Shortcuts” pane, click on “+” at the bottom. Select the application from the pop-up button (i.e. Scrivener) then enter the menu title to which you wish to add a custom keyboard shortcut. For what we are talking about, it would be “Look Up in Dictionary and Thesaurus”. Then click in the “Keyboard Shortcut” text field and type the shortcut you desire. Then hit the “Add” button.
Obviously the above example won’t work in Scrivener until 2.0 is out, though.
Also, recommend ServiceScrubber for all of your service management stuff. Disable the ones you never use, assign shortcuts the ones you need, and strip out shortcuts for the ones that you don’t need.
When I load up ServicesScrubber I find a whole bunch of services I cannot change (some others I can) e.g. Chinese Text Converter and Disk Utility. Is there a way to remove these as well?
There is a work-around, but the developer does not recommend it unless you REALLY want to and REALLY know what you’re doing. Check for details at http://www.manytricks.com/blog/?id=30
