I mentioned this in someone else’s thread, but thought I should make a new suggestion: I think a path navigator in the Header View would be very useful to get a quick look at where you are in your folder hierarchy, particularly if you have a very full Binder. However I concede it may not work well if you have a hierarchy many levels deep and/or very long folder/text names… but just thought I’d make the suggestion.
I did a quick mockup for myself just to see what it looked like (and sorry for taking liberties with Scrivener’s already excellent GUI.
I did actually consider this recently, but here are the main problems I foresee:
• Even with short bread-crumb trails, if the view is split horizontally they could soon become unreadable.
• The header bar is party intended as a place for editing the title - this wold be problematic with a bread-crumb trail (because only the last part of the trail would be editable, as you wouldn’t want to edit the other titles in such a situation really).
• The title of the document itself becomes demoted.
That’s not to say I don’t like your mockup - I think it looks rather nice as it goes. It’s just that I think the potential problems outweigh the potential benefits, especially when Reveal in Finder does the trick.
Thinking about this some more, though, what about a compromise. You know how if you ctrl-click on the .scriv icon at the top of the toolbar (the one next to “Text-Scene” in your example) you see the a menu showing the folders on disk in which the file is contained? (This is something that works in most Cocoa apps.) What if the icon in the header bar could do something similar? Either ctrl-clicking on it could bring up a menu containing the hierarchy, top-down, just as in the toolbar icon menu, or there could be a separate “Path” submenu in the normal icon menu that shows this.
I actually quite like that as a solution. Thoughts?
I actually tried a right-click on the Header icon when I was first playing around with the Scrivener interface, thinking I would see a hierarchy menu - so yes, I think that would definitely be a nice addition, and consistent with the Mac UI.
However I would still wish for the visible path navigator (View option?
In terms of losing the Title editing ability in the Header, I personally think there’s so many places that the Title can be edited that it would be an easy tradeoff.
Also, as the active item is listed in the Window Toolbar (and Binder if you have it showing, and Inspector if you have it showing), I don’t see it as a big issue that the Title is to the far right of the trail.
In terms of horizontal space, the Finder’s implementation prioritises the title at the lowest level, and only shows the icons for those items that can’t fit in the space, so you could see your scene Title at the very least.
Anyway, thanks for considering, and for you very quick reply!
In the editor, the document name is shown at the page’s top. I know that if I control-click the title (Mac), I can quickly see the document’s full path. But it would be helpful to be able to toggle on/off the ability to see the full path right in the title. (I know I can also scroll around the binder to see what is highlighted, but in large projects this can be tedious.)
When I’m working on storylines, I tend to just name the documents “scene list” or something, one for each storyline folder. So when I’m conducting full project searches and clicking around random documents, I’m often unsure which sub-folder I’m in. Yes – I know I could improve my naming of the documents to include more information in their titles. But seeing the full path would be helpful in many situations, aside from hyper-detailed document titling.
Of course, this option might already exist, but I haven’t been able to find it if so.
Worth saying here what an incredible and well done application Scrivener is, it’s all I use for just about everything.
Right-clicking on the document title also gives you the Reveal in Binder option, which might be more helpful than the path in some situations.
Also, there’s no requirement that you give a document a title at all. If you don’t, Scrivener will auto-fill a title from either the Synopsis (if it exists) or the body text. That may be a way to get more useful titles for navigation purposes without having to actually assign them yourself.
- so yes, I think that would definitely be a nice addition, and consistent with the Mac UI.