I’ve occasionally had the problem that Contextual Menus goes all squirrelly on me – it stops seeing the Scrivener commands. This is a problem, because the ONLY thing I use Contextual Menus for are the Scrivener “Make New Clipping” and “Append to Current Clipping” commands. And I use it all the time, so this is a big problem when it happens.
It would make my life easier if I could use third party tools to define keystrokes to those commands, but I have had problems doing that, because those to commands are not Menu Items.
Of course, on the surface it doesn’t make sense to make them menu items – I’m already IN Scriv if I have access to the menu item, I can just hit the New button or some such. But it would be useful to put those commands in a Menu where other apps could get at them.
I hope that made sense…
chrisw
[who divides the world of computer purchasing into two groups – those that can run Scriv, and those that can’t]
I’m not quite sure I follow you. Do you mean the clippings menu items that appears in the Services menus (and that in 10.6 can appear in the contextual menus of other apps)? If so, OS X itself determines when these items are available and get placed in the contextual menus - in the case of Scrivener’s, they will only get placed there when you have some text selected, because they are text clipping services.
Doh! I should have said Services Menu. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean, but let me try to explain this again, as that last explanation was mush.
I oftentimes want to copy items off of a web page into Scrivener. I can do that by selecting the stuff to be copied and then either going to the Services menu or right-0clicking and selecting “Scrivener: Make New Clipping” from the pop-up list. But I have run into problems now and again (once with a Snow Leopard upgrade, and occasionally for other reasons) where the Services Menu malfunctions, and the Scrivener items don’t appear. But I am pretty much limited to only a couple of ways to get that functionality, because it’s a Services function, not a menu item. If it was a menu item, then there are other ways/apps to set up keyboard shortcuts that could get me that functionality, but they are all predicated on being able to type in the exact words of the menu item (which in this case doesn’t exist).
Does that make more sense? Am I missing something here?
But there would be no way for other applications to get to a menu item that is in one of the Scrivener menus - that’s the whole purpose of the Services menu, that it is available globally. So adding these things to a Scrivener menu wouldn’t help - they would be unavailable from anywhere except Scrivener itself, keyboard shortcuts or no.
Hope that makes sense.
All the best,
Keith
The apps I have seen allow you to specify an app to point the shortcut at. (System Prefs=> Keyboard=> Application Shortcuts works that way, too.)
I’m hampered in that I haven’t looked at one of these in a while – I just remember constantly going “Damn, this one also requires the Shortcut to point to a menu command within the app” a lot while looking for this. Luckily, everything seems to be working now [knock on wood], but the recent post on Scriv 2.0 got me thinking about this again.