Several newer text-only editors have a fantastic feature that I’ll call Quick Jump which would be a fantastic model for giving Scrivener a massive navigational speed boost!
Here’s how it works in Sublime Text, for example.
• Open a folder in ST to give context
• Main Menu > Goto > Goto Anything… ⌘P
- A sheet appears with…
- a text field
- a list of all files in the folder (ST only filters against file names in this feature)
• Type summat
- With each letter typed…
- the results filter based on a quality fuzzy matching algorithm
- each individual result shows the typed letters in bold, making it clear how the results match the inputs
• Navigate with the ▼|▲ keys
- Rows in the results highlight accordingly
- Without committing to the selection, the contents of the selected document appear in the content area below the sheet. This allows for confirmation that the destination is, indeed, the desired one.
• Click or use highlight+return to open the file
Here’s one example of how Scrivener could do it.
• Open a .scriv to give context
• ⌘O (Assuming I’m not the only one to rarely use the standard Open… in Scrivener, which could be remapped to ⌥⌘O. JetBrains does this in RubyMine, I believe, so there’s a distant precedent.)
- A sheet appears with…
- a text field
- a list of all items displayed in the Binder (folder names, file names, sketch names, etc.), potentially with a line or two in gray to serve as a first-order preview
• Type summat
- With each letter typed…
- See the description for ST’s “Type summat”
• Navigate with the ▼|▲ keys
- See the description for ST’s “Type summat”
- Ditto.
• Navigate with the
key - If the selected item contains sub-documents, the filtering context becomes that subset of documents, otherwise the key has no effect, or simply flashes an “end of the line” notice
• Navigate with the ◄ key - Ditto, only expanding the filtering source to include all sibling files and containers