I love, adore and worship the screen splitting business. I use the minimalistic layout where I can only see the 2 planes, and use the hotkeys to hide toolbars/binders that I don’t need.
I tend to have more stuff open though. I start opening quick reference windows and things get messy (on my tiny mac book air 13 inch).
I have another request regarding splitting (assuming the function really doesn’t exist; if it does, please point out my error).
I use Scrivener pretty much all the time with the screen split vertically, with the thing I’m writing in now in the lefthand pane and the thing I’m referring to in the righthand pane. Very frequently, I get mixed up as to which pane is in focus and navigating in the binder leads to my losing the view of the thing I wanted to keep in its pane and the new thing I want to see being in the wrong pane.
Extricating myself from this situation takes a fair amount of fiddling; something that would help a lot with this would be a “Switch panes” button to put the lefthand pane on the right (or the top pane on the bottom) and vice versa.
View > Layout > Swap Editors. You may also find View > Binder Affects useful; you can use that to set up your workspace so that clicks in the binder always affect a specific split rather than whichever is in focus, so for instance if you’re most frequently loading new research documents you could set Binder Affects to the right editor. To load into the left editor then you could just drag the document from the binder to the editor header or use the Go To menu (from View or from the icon button in the left editor header). Another option would be to lock an editor using View > Editor > Lock in Place, which will prevent binder clicks from affecting it.
Wow, that’s most helpful. For a start, I’ve assigned a keyboard shortcut to the Swap Editors command. I may end up using the Binder Affects command and, as you suggest, using drags to affect the other editor. Thanks a lot!
There’s also a very useful preference for this sort of thing, which I tend to turn on but which is off by default. Under the “Navigation” pane of Preferences, there’s the “Lock in Place” option:
If you tick that, then whenever one editor is locked-in-place (so that binder selection doesn’t affect it), the binder selection will always affect the other editor (regardless of where the focus is).
So, with this turned on, you just hit opt-cmd-L to lock the editor you want to keep as-is, and after that, any clicks in the binder will always affect the other editor until you unlock things again. This saves you from having to worry about the “Binder Affects” setting at all.
Keith, is there any way that you could code an option for two editor views to be in separate, resizable and moveable windows, rather than just side-by-side, or one on top of t’other? That way I could keep one editor in a small window showing the relevant bit of the draft in outline view (say), and the text I’m working on in the other. A bit like working in compose with the inspector open. Or perhaps I could achieve the same thing if the inspector showed the binder structure. Er, or something…
Well, except that QR panels can’t show group views like the corkboard and outliner (or even Scrivenings for that matter). They only ever display the text content of the item.
Gareth, are you primarily looking for a way to better focus the binder? If so, check out the Documents/Hoist Binder command. As with outliners from the days of yore, this will focus the display on the container of your choosing. The rest of the binder will be completely hidden.
No, it wasn’t better focus on the binder that I was after, but more flexibility in the layout & sizing of the elements on screen. That is to say: I’d like the editor I’m working in to be the biggest item on screen (as in compose mode), and to have the other in some kind of floating relation to it (as with the inspector etc in compose mode). You might think of it as “undocking” the editor panes from the main Scriv window… or perhaps a bit like the way Tinderbox allows you to have two or more views of the underlying data open at the same time.
What I’m doing is rewriting/polishing/adding material to sections of my book, with the other editor showing an outliner view so that I can keep an overview of the structure in mind, and also see the status of each section.
The corkboard and outliner are fundamentally hardwired into the main window, and vast amounts of the program would need rewriting to have them separated out into other windows, so there are no plans for this in the immediate future, I’m afraid (or even for version 3.0).
Thanks Keith, I feared it might be something pretty fundamental…
I don’t suppose the inspector could be made to show either the binder or an outline view, so that you could work in compose mode with that floating alongside?
In the binder, select all the documents you want to see the outline for, then choose either Edit > Copy Special > Copy Documents as Scrivener Links or Copy Documents as TOC and paste this into the Project Notes. (As Links will give you just a flat list; TOC will preserve the binder hierarchy with indentation but will also give you unnecessary <$p> which you can ignore or remove as you wish.) In the Navigation pane of Scrivener > Preferences, select to open clicked Scrivener links in the current editor.
Now you can use either the floating Project Notes window or the inspector to view your outline while working with the main editor, and clicking a document in the outline will load it in the editor. This will work even in composition mode.
Thanks MM, I’ll give that a try tomorrow. Downside is that I won’t be able to change status of a section in the view, but it’ll be a help. I like compose mode too much…
You may also find View > Binder Affects useful; you can use that to set up your workspace so that clicks in the binder always affect a specific split rather than whichever is in focus, so for instance if you’re most frequently loading new research documents you could set Binder Affects to the right editor. To load into the left editor then you could just drag the document from the binder to the editor header or use the Go To menu (from View or from the icon button in the left editor header). Another option would be to lock an editor using View > Editor > Lock in Place, which will prevent binder clicks from affecting it.
