Although I can navigate via the mouse to Edit > Text Tidying > Remove Empty Lines Between Paragraphs, I want to be able to do this via keyboard.
Scrivener does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. Also, it will not allow me to make a keyboard shortcut. So I am left with navigating via separate keystrokes.
Here is my question: Shouldn’t I be able to do this by typing Alt E > D > R? I can get Alt E to open the edit menu, but D does not navigate me to Text Tidying.
Since I can use this same process to open pretty much any other menu item, I wonder if this is a bug. I’d appreciate any suggestions from more experienced users.
The issue is that the accelerator key ‘d’ is colliding with the Edit ▸ Delete entry, which is disabled in this case (fortunately!) and thus fails. It’s a problem with the toolkit as well, in that in my opinion if there is a collision, that shouldn’t be the end of things because tapping ‘d’ repeatedly would cycle between options. Normally it does, but it breaks when one of the entries is disabled.
That said, we really should not have a collision between a perfectly safe to open submenu, and a disruptive command like ‘delete’! I’ll make sure we have a ticket open on that.
As for it having an entry in the shortcut list, this does have an open ticket. Really the ticket is for all menu commands to be added to the list, but as it takes manual effort to do so, this has never happened, and instead it gets gradually added to over time.
My trick, by the way, is: Alt,e,↑,↑,→, to get into this menu.
Amber, I really appreciate your taking the time to catch me up. This is the context I needed.
Your trick of Alt, e, ↑, ↑, → is super helpful. My end goal is to make a script via AutoHotKey. I can have the script mimic these keys and assign the whole thing to a keyboard shortcut. Once I do that, I can assign a Stream Deck key to the newly made shortcut, and voila, I’ll have my automation.
By the way, an aha moment was realizing, thanks to your help, that I could map the script to up arrows; when I had tried down arrows, it wouldn’t faithfully recreate the action. The up arrows approach has fewer steps and perhaps bypasses something that is stopping the script’s iteration, so I’m optimistic it’ll work.
Using @AmberV 's keystroke iteration (but adding a final down key press), I could write a script for AutoHotkey to automate the navigation. This is the first time I’ve tried AutoHotkey; I’ll probably use this approach as a workaround should I encounter any more accelerator key collisions in Scrivener until the developers sort this out.
With this solved, I added a button to Stream Deck to execute the AutoHotkey script with the push of a button. It goes alongside the button to turn straight quotes into curly quotes. They are enjoying each other’s company.
In case it’s helpful, here is the script for AutoHotkey:
if WinExist("ahk_exe Scrivener.exe")
{
WinActivate ; Activate Scrivener
Sleep 100 ; Brief pause to ensure the window is active
Send "!e" ; Press Alt+E to open the Edit menu
Sleep 200 ; Allow time for the menu to open
Send "{Up}" ; Navigate up one item
Sleep 200
Send "{Up}" ; Navigate up another item
Sleep 200
Send "{Right}" ; Open the submenu
Sleep 200
Send "{Down}" ; Navigate down another item
Sleep 200
Send "{Enter}" ; Select the option in the submenu
}
Jim, I own the Stream Deck XL. It has more keys than I need for Scrivener, so a less pricey Stream Deck model with fewer keys would also work for writers.
This photo shows it in my composing and writing studio just below the monitor, on the right just above the MIDI keyboard. It’s become indispensable to my creative workflow.
