I love scrivener. I use scrivener to write up my engineering reports for school, and really any other report I have to write. Scrivener is AMAZING for organizing information! I have two, hopefully small, requests concerning the Main Toolbar and undo option.
For the Main toolbar, there are a couple of commands that I use very often which would be really helpful to have on the Main Toolbar. Specifically:
Save
Convert formatting to default text style
Split at selection
Split with selection as Title
These hopefully small changes would really streamline the user interface for me. Now, I know there are keyboard shortcuts for these commands, but I almost NEVER use any keyboard shortcuts past cut and paste. I just don’t have the memory or dexterity for it.
As for the undo button, it would be very helpful if the undo button worked independently of the selected windows. So when I hit undo it undoes the last thing I did. I find the way it works now to be inefficient if I want to undo the last few changes I made. Especially if I want to undo something independent of text like reorganizing files or renaming folders. Plus if I cut and paste from one document to another it would be nice to just hit undo twice and have the documents return to the way I had them. Just the option of a linear undo would work wonders.
As an aside, if we are just wishing for anything, it would be very nice to be able to clear the formatting on highlighted text, just like in Microsoft Word, by selecting the text and pressing a clear formatting button.
Although they’re not available as toolbar buttons, you can use the mouse to access both Split functions quickly via the right-click context menu when you’re working in the editor. Using “Save” is typically not necessary since Scrivener auto-saves every two seconds (running exactly the same process as a manual save), hence there’s no button for this–having one would give a wrong impression, really. What you might find more helpful is adding a button for “Take Snapshot” (or “Take Snapshot with Title”), which is a great way to save a version of your current document which you can then view or restore later if you make further changes that you don’t like–so this is very much like a “save” in other single-document programs–or a button for “Back Up To” which saves a backup of the entire project, again creating a restore point, like a snapshot but for the whole project. A “Back Up Now” icon will be coming too which will just run the automatic backup whenever you select it (compared to Back Up To, which will ask you to select a name and location for the backup). Either of these options is probably more what you’re looking for in regard to save anyway, since they’ll create a static version of your work which you can return to later and which won’t be overwritten by the regular save/autosave routine.
As for a global undo, this isn’t really possible in a lot of cases because of technical limitations. It’s also not always desirable–while I understand your wish to be able to just undo the last series of actions, it can also be quite useful to have separate undo stacks for different elements, so you can for instance make some changes to your document, make a change to the synopsis, make a change to document notes, and then realize you want to undo whatever you did in the document and do so without needing to also wipe your edits from the notes and synopsis.
Scratch Pad is really best accessed with a keyboard shortcut, reason being that it will be getting updated such that it has a global shortcut, meaning you can call it up whenever Scrivener is running even if Scrivener isn’t the focused application. You could have your browser open and then tap the shortcut to call up Scratch Pad to copy over some notes, then close the Scratch Pad again with the same key combo, etc. So adapting to using a shortcut for that now will be more beneficial in the long run.
