Loss of Focus after drag and drop

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I commented on this on Facebook but should mention it here.

After playing with Scrivener earlier today I discovered being able to drop and drag items from the Binder and Keywords Window and being to insert either links, text, or the contents of the Binder item. Very cool, BUT, if you drag something into a Document, focus should be retained into the document dragged to, shouldn’t it? At the moment focus is lost and you have to click on the editing area to get it back. If you’re typing away in a text document and forget this, and then press , you get swapped to corkboard mode, and if you press you add a new document!

Surely the focus should be be at the point after the inserted item, so that you can continue on typing?

Laura Ess

2

Well, arguably you’ve stopped typing to start dragging with the mouse… :wink: What happens technically is that clicking to initiate the drag changes the focus away from your document to the binder. A drop action doesn’t trigger a focus change between different parts of the window, so you’ll find this throughout–dragging from the binder to the document references leaves focus in the binder, dragging between split editors leaves focus in the editor where the drag initiated, dragging from the inspector synopsis to the editor leaves focus in the synopsis. Since you’re already working the mouse (or touchpad or stylus, as the case may be), hopefully a click after the drop isn’t too tedious. In many cases retaining the focus is desirable anyway, e.g. after dragging a paragraph from one editor split to another, you can easily delete it from the original.

3

Perhaps it is when you have two windows up, but I was referring to dragging from the Binder or Keyword Window mostly. In those cases it’s simply copying a block of text (or an image) into that window. In those cases it’s not about moving something between two windows (and wouldn’t you cut it first, then paste it if it were?) but adding it.It’s not so much the one click that bothers me, but the forgetting where the focus has gone and the consequences of that. The main benefit of changing this would be keeping the flow in writing.

4

Right, what I was saying is that when you click in the binder or other window to start the drag, that action triggers the change of focus, the same as if you had clicked without dragging.