Keyboard shortcuts

Hi! I’m just getting back into using Scrivener after a break of no writing (gasp!), this time with a nice new laptop. It’s allowed me to fall in love with Scrivener all over again! My workflow this time around has involved a lot more use of keyboard shortcuts, and there were a few things I found really unintuitive and would love to see improved, or given further options for customization.

  • When in the binder or outliner view, there seem to be two ways to create a new file: Ctrl+N or Enter. However, there does not seem to be an easy way to change the title of a file. Any permutation of Tab/Ctrl/Shift/Alt + Enter (which seems to me like it should work) just creates a new file, as if it were plain Enter. You can press Tab to edit the title, but this switches your focus from the binder to the notecard in the inspector; after you’re done you have to cycle through using Ctrl+Tab to get back to the binder. (Also, I can’t get this to work at all in the outliner.) It seems like there should be a way to do this quickly (via kb shortcuts) without being diverted from the view you’re already in (binder, outliner, etc).

  • There are no dedicated shortcuts to switch your focus to the editor/binder/etc; the only option is to cycle through using Ctrl+Tab until you hit the one you want. It would be great if there was a way of shortcutting to switch focus to the binder, inspector, etc. as needed!

  • Speaking of that, I can’t find any way to switch focus to the Document Notes field using only kb shortcuts. Does one exist?

  • In general, I really wish there was an ability to create a kb shortcut for the “Convert Formatting to Default Text Style” option. (Even more wishy: I wish there was a way to universally apply this option onto every file in a project! Instead, if I want to change to a different one of my preset editor styles I have to apply the change to each file individually. This is annoying with projects I’ve already started, which already have multiple files inside them.)

  • I tend to write in “web mode” all the time–I always have double-enters between my paragraphs. This doesn’t work when I want to compile into a manuscript view, obviously, since the compiler doesn’t realize those breaks are just for me. Is there a way to input such a thing as “EnterEnter --> Enter” into the compiler’s replacement feature? I’ve done a lot of searching for how this might work and it seems there’s a way to do it for Mac, but not Windows. For now I’m using a workaround with the document spacing as I type in the editor so that it looks like there are double enters between paragraphs, but as there are plenty of things I write that I want to retain double-spacing, it seems to me there should be a way to specify this individually for each relevant compile. That way my writing flow can stay the same for every project, and it’s only the compiling and typesetting part that I have to fiddle around with for the output.

I just have to add that the “sometimes I want to export with double-enters, sometimes I don’t” issue is made especially infuriating by the fact that there is no apparent way to set a default editor view for the current project only.

I’m in the middle of writing two projects – one that I want to export with empty lines between paragraphs, and one which I don’t. Since there is no way to make this a compile operation (either the addition or deletion of empty paragraph breaks), I have had to change the default spacing between paragraphs to trick myself into not double-entering. Yet this default also applies to new documents I create in the other project where I don’t want the spacing to apply! Basically the workaround I’ve applied to do a nice-looking compile in one project is unable to be specified as something just for that project, and it is really bugging me. It seems like the Mac version has an easy fix for this–a project-specific override option for the default style. Can we have one of those, please?

I should probably have put this in the wishlist thread to begin with. Sorry.

A lot of this exists or is on the list for future implementation, so I hope that’s good news! :slight_smile:

To go through…

This uses the standard Windows’ F2 shortcut for renaming.

This is planned, along with shortcuts for specific elements in the inspector.

This is also something we’d like to add: the ability to assign shortcuts to any menu commands.

You can select multiple files in the binder and then run the Documents > Convert > Formatting to Default Text Style command to apply the changes to all of them at once.

Not yet, but this again is something we’d like to get in there, along with replacing other non-printing characters (so you could easily get rid of unwanted Tabs or such).

Like all the other Mac 2.0 features, this will be coming to the Windows version as development continues. For now, I’d suggest just working in whichever style is more comfortable to you and then compiling to something like .rtf or .doc and doing a find/replace in a word processor to clean up the double/single returns for whichever project needs it. That will probably be less headache for you; you’ll be able to see it the way you want when working and just take care of that after the drafting phase is over.

If there was one shortcut I would wish for, it would be linking/unlinking highlighted words. Word uses the [ctrl]-K shortcut to open the linking/unlinking dialogue. If I had a quarter for every time I have tried to use [ctrl]-K in Scrivener only to remember that the functionality doesn’t exist, I’d have a lot of quarters. :wink: