Hi,
In many text editors (Textpad or Visual Studio, for example), it’s possible to select multiple lines and then press the Tab key to insert a tab at the beginning of all selected lines, shifting everything to the right. Likewise, pressing shift+tab removes a tab from the beginning of all selected lines, shifting everything back to the left.
In Scrivener, selecting text and hitting tab effectively just erases the text, which I can’t see being useful for anyone.
Thanks,
Matt
In most word processors, selecting text and then typing will overwrite the selected text. Scrivener is much more of a word processor than a text editor. I’m not the last word on Wish List requests, but I think your suggestion would probably confuse more users than it helps.
Katherine
Yeah, tabs really aren’t used that often in word processing (or they shouldn’t be). So while this feature would be rather crucial in a text editor designed for coding, it could if anything encourage bad habits in a word processor, where the use of pseudo-whitespace in the form of indent and block controls are used to manipulate the offset of text from the page margins.
So toward that end, we do have some stuff planned. In fact, I thought it had already been implemented on Windows, but searching around in the latest beta I no longer see it. Perhaps it was removed because a critical flaw was found in it. Or maybe I am hallucinating. At any rate, there will be a set of indent shortcuts so you can easily block indent entire selections.
This is something that would make Scrivener great for doing outlines—especially with one extra feature: for tabbed in lines to automatically indent line-wrapping to the same distance to the margin. That makes it really easy to make quick outlines that stay visually clear, regardless of how long sub-topic lines get.
I write a lot of outlines. This is something I’d like every text/word processor to do.
Oh, also one last thing: sometimes the commands to tab over are things like command-] and command-[ to keep confusion down for people used to the common way the tab key works.
If you are using the text editor to generate outlines, instead of the outlining capabilities of the software itself, why not use the list feature which already sets block indenting and does the tab insertion for you?
As Ioa says, the list function sounds like what you actually want here, but just to respond to the initial point, you can indent multiple lines at once by selecting them and using Ctrl-T (first-line indent) or Ctrl-Q (hanging indent). Hold Shift with the shortcut to decrease the indent.