I tried something a little different today that some of you might find helpful.
When you’re working on more than one manuscript, they look pretty identical in the Mac Finder, and they look pretty identical when you have any of them open.
I’m working on four manuscripts at once. Three are separate novels for a trilogy, and the other is the first novel in a series. I’m in late revision and I flip back-and-forth between them regularly.
So I created individual icons for each of them. I replaced the icons in each manuscript title, and now they are much more identifiable in the Mac Finder, and that icon is in the title bar when you have the manuscript open.
Once you create an icon, it’s essentially just a matter of copy and paste to get that icon to be the icon representing a file on Mac, and the individual icon in the title bar of Scrivener.
If you don’t want to create icons, you can also use different emojis, and there are hundreds to choose from, including numbers.
If anyone wants to try this but might be confused by how to do it, just reach out. It’s really pretty simple, and I can guide you. Here’s an example of how these look:
I also started putting the current date that I am editing something as a part of the title, so that I don’t have to go digging around in the Mac folder to find that.
Not so sure about changing the title of your Scrivener projects all the time though. i) Seems like this would have dizzying results in your Scriv backups folder. ii) I couldn’t use Scriv’s Favorites menu for my projects-in-action like I do. iii) It also duplicates by manual adjustment metadata already available in the Finder.
Seems like setting the sort on your current projects folder to sort by Date Modified would take care of this without manual adjustment.
No offense to any of those who do, but I never use the ‘favorites’ folder.
My manuscripts are all moving targets, constantly, and that would not be reflected well in the favorites folder unless I took the time to actually change what’s in the favorites folder.
Having my ‘favorites’ in a single folder in the Mac Finder seems to work a lot better. If I edit one of them, that’s reflected there automatically.
I’m also not a big fan of Scrivener updating the modification date simply if you select a different subdocument in the Binder, or scroll.
That, to me, is not a ‘modification’, while actually editing the text, is.
I want the modification date to reflect the last time something was actually modified, and not the last time I might have perused the manuscript. I do like the ‘mdate:xd’ tool a lot, though. That thing is pretty brilliant.
I kind of wish that ‘auto save’ was separate from ‘save on quit’, because that saves copies I don’t need, and I would end up with hundreds of copies to wade through. So when I quit Scrivener (which voice control just tried to express as ‘screw her’, heh heh) I always force quit it which prevents ‘save on quit’.
This is because the file that saves the interface state does indeed change if you do those things, and it’s part of the project. (This kind of change does not trigger an automatic backup, though.)
Huh? Both the autosave and the save on quit update the current copy of the project. They don’t generate new versions. Force quit is extremely dangerous, because (1) it prevents Scrivener from doing a variety of normal housekeeping tasks and (2) you’re assuming that you never have unsaved “new” material when you quit the program, which is not a safe assumption.
If the problem is that you are getting backup copies that you don’t want, check the Scrivener → Settings → Backups tab.
Edit: As @gr noted, changing the name of the project does start a new backup counter. Scrivener has no way of knowing it’s the same project with a different name. So managing the backup proliferation that results is up to you.
