I don’t have anything to add, regarding the technical details, other than what I wrote about it before.
It would probably require system level maintenance of some sort, as Scrivener itself doesn’t have anything to do with it—to the extent that I don’t see how upgrading software could change anything, beyond how renaming menu commands would cause the OS to no longer find them.
The type of maintenance I would focus on is cache clearing and maybe resetting Scrivener’s .plist file too (if it’s having troubles saving to the file for some reason).
But again, I already shared the extent of my knowledge and speculation above, I am just summarising, here.
Here is the checklist for resetting preferences, which includes backing up your Scrivener settings to a file. Unfortunately that does not include macOS settings, such as shortcuts.
But that is one big reason fo why I switched to using BetterTouchTool for all of my shortcuts in the first place. Given that trashing your settings is such a common troubleshooting step on a Mac, I was losing them too often—and I customise a lot of shortcuts, in almost every program I use regularly.
Actually, after I deleted all plists, I redid the shortcuts. But they didn’t last long. Today, four days later, they have disapeared again.
So, I might try BetterTouchTool as AmberV suggests, although I have few shortcuts overall, and I would have prefered to stay within the Scrivener and MacOS fields.
Ah, as I suspected. As Amber suggested (and as I certainly found thanks to their suggestion) BTT is a very useful app, and I’m glad I found it through this route.
Except it’s kind of a nightmare with BTT I’m not familiar with to add a keyboard shortcut to a specific sub-submenu function. It will be time consuming to figure that out. No easy simple guideline.
I am in the same boat as you. I acquired BTT a while ago to use a shortcut scripted by another forum user, but I too have not yet found out how to set up a BTT shortcut to a menu item. I find Btt somewhat daunting to use.
Sub-menu names are roughly the same as with the Mac tool, only you use semicolons instead of -> between menu levels. It does also require full paths always (I believe that’s a limitation of the accessibility access it is using to pull all of this off, Keyboard Maestro also requires stipulating the full path[1]).
To set one up:
From within the Keyboard Shortcuts section, click the + button below the main list on the left.
Press the keys for the shortcut.
Click the large + button in the actions column and use the search field to locate “Trigger Menu Bar Menu-Item”. After doing so, I recommend clicking on the star icon, below the dropdown in the action setup sidebar. This will add it to the favourites list at the top, so you don’t have to constantly search for it.
Type in the full path to the menu command, such as Edit;Select;Select Sentence with Spaces.
And that’s it! The help text shows more advanced command paths as well. You can select a menu command by its position, which can be useful for commands where the label changes, like Format;Revision Mode;(2). That second entry changes a lot based on the selection context and whether or not you are currently using a revision level. Instead of bothering with all of those variants, you can just say “do that one, the second down from the top, whatever it may be”.
But there are definitely some useful things to look into in that help text. The || method for listing commands with multiple labels is especially useful for applying shortcuts to “Show|Hide Stuff” style menu toggles.
Although KM has a much nicer approach in that it uses the accessibility kit to build a menu picker, that will fill in the menu path for you. Hopefully some day BTT gets something like that! ↩︎
As my wife has said to me so often, “How is one expected to know that?” It’s pretty arcane that you need to search for that particular set of words to set up a keyboard shortcut without it being documented. It makes me wonder what other search strings may be lying hidden which would be useful if one only knew them.
