Navigation (2 requests)

Scrivener Wish List
1

First, let me thank you for such an elegant/intuitive/powerful tool. I just love Scrivener/MMD and I’ve been recommending it to everyone around me since I discovered it. :smiley:

However, I have a few suggestions/requests concerning navigation and MMD. MMD related requests are covered in another post. Concerning navigation, I personally think that :

  1. (I found at least one complaint about the current behavior concerning this one in the forum, but no suggestion to go with it, so here is mine)

When navigating (either in outliner or corkboard modes), I think navigation should be closer to the navigation in the Finder. It should be possible to “go into” the content of a child element by pressing “cmd + down arrow”, and “pop out” to the parent element with “cmd + up arrow”. In the latter case, the cursor (in the parent element) should be on the (child) element that was just exited.
This would make scanning the content of a folder much more efficient, which is slightly troublesome now (in my personal experience), especially when looking for a piece of information in a research container having many sub-documents (with insufficient or no synopsis - web pages, .pdf, etc. to get to the right place on the first attempt). The fact that the cursor does not stay where it was in the parent folder when I went “into” the child I just exited forces me to keep asking myself: “did I just look inside this or that child?” and visit/re-visit the wrong subdocuments over and over again. I think the “standard” navigation through folders/sub-folders would solve all this.

  1. (I searched for this one in the forum, but couldn’t find anything similar, but there are so many posts around navigation that I might be wrong)

One more option should be available in preferences -> navigation:
When in editor mode, open folders: -> As “Edit Scrivenings (Selection)”. The “selection” would automatically be all child elements, as if expanded and selected. Thus, if you use folders as section titles and scrivenings for their contents, selecting a folder would show (naturally) the whole section, that could be edited instantly. Enlarging/refining the selection of scrivenings displayed would be controlled simply by navigating the binder. I don’t know if this is different from how scrivener was intended to be used, but it would perfectly suit the way I’d like to use it.

Thanks,

Jonathan

2

Hi,

I quite like both of these suggestions. No. 2 is on the list of things to do for 1.02 (though it may get pushed back to another 1.0x release depending on time). No. 1 is a little more problematic, because currently cmd-up and cmd-down already do something: they take you to the first or last document in the corkboard or outliner. I programmed this behaviour in the corkboard to match that of the outline view, which is coded by Apple, and this is standard behaviour for such views. I do like your idea, though, so I would welcome other users’ views on this. (Remember that currently you can use alt-cmd-O to open the selected folder, and then you can use the back button to navigate back to the enclosing folder.)

Best,
Keith

3

Hi Kieth,

I also like Jonathan’s suggestion. And for the same reason. I find myself occasionally re-looking at docs I’ve already into because my cursor does not act as a placeholder.

Thanks for asking,

Tim

4

Oh, actually it would be difficult to get the selection back to where it was. Nice refinement idea, but that won’t happen in a 1.0x release, sorry.
Best,
Keith