Quick reference - add a shortcut?

Very often, I can see, in the binder, a document I want to Quick Reference. Currently my options are:

(1) Click on it and it appears in an editor and then I hit and it appears as a quick reference page… and then I need to make it got AWAY from the editor in which it’s appeared.

(2) As (1) except I use the toolbar shortcut.

(3) I crank through the View>Quick Reference>MyUnwiedlyBinderStructure menu.

What I really really would like is a modified click which would open the clicked document in a Quick Reference pane. alt+click doesn’t seem to be doing anything at the moment; perhaps that could be made available?

The trouble is that the selection always changes before the modified click is registered, although I do agree that this would be useful.

One thing you can do is use the synopsis finder - type the name of the document, or the first few letters of the name, into that, then hit tab and space.

All the best,
Keith

Why not just lock the current document with Option-Cmd-L. Then click on the document you want to Quick Reference and then hit the spacebar.

That particular lash-up hadn’t occurred to me. But still it’s rather less wieldy than the modified click Keith says can’t be done…

What I was thinking was that maybe dragging a document somewhere might be able to create a QR window (dragging doesn’t change the selection), but I’m not sure how to achieve that, really, as where would the drag go? In Photoshop, you can drag a tab out of the window to create a new window, or in Safari you can just drag a tab out of the tab bar. Drags out of the binder in Scrivener can be dropped as Scrivener links and other things, though… Hmm.

All the best,
Keith

How about drag to the Inspector? I don’t have Scrivener here in the office, so can’t test to see if this has already been assigned.

Or drag to the left of Binder (like tearing it off Binder, outside Scrivener itself).

The trouble is that dragging to various places in the inspector already has a meaning - into the references, into the notes, into the synopsis and so on. And dragging to the left of the binder will only work if the window doesn’t take up the whole screen, which is no good in Lion’s full screen mode. Another solution is having a special “well” for this, onto which you could drag the documents. I’m still pondering on it, so suggestions definitely welcome. :slight_smile:

A well, like what I use in Path Finder, was going to be my next suggestion. However, you could just have a target object on the toolbar, such that any Binder doc dragged to it creates a Quick Reference window for it.

Or even the QuickReference toolbar item itself. That would require building a custom toolbar type, but it might be possible…

The only drawback is that it wouldn’t be a great solution for those who hide their toolbars.

Or add a modifier key to the drag, like Ctrl-Option-Drag to Inspector.

What if you added a contextual menu item: Open in QR window & restore Editor to Previous document?

Obviously, you’d need a more succinct menu item, but you get the idea. Or maybe an option: restore current document view when opening in QR window?

Maybe that’s just a casualty of the work method. :smiling_imp: After all, you can’t drag to the inspector if the inspector is hidden, either. Full screen is what it is, I suppose–I wish hot corner/key options like “Show Desktop” that you can use for maximized apps were likewise available when running FS on Lion. (Some programs they are, but that might be not-true-FS or just non-Cocoa apps or “this is technically a bug”; no Apple programs allow it, annoyingly.) --Note that’s a Mac-wish not a Scrivener wish, as Scriv presumably adheres to the correct behavior.

The other vague idea I had was enabling an option to open a QR editor window without a document in it, so you could type a shortcut to open the window, then drag the document to it from the binder the way you can drag to the regular editor header. The QR window would in essence then be the well. Possible technological problems aside, there’s potentially a design hang up there in that it’s not typical to have an empty editor, so that might be confusing. But it is a separate pop-up window, so having a different behavior might not be all that out there?

Good day,

Solution:

Use better touch tools:
blog.boastr.net/

Go to the track pad settings.
Create shortcut bindings for “Scivener” window type.

Create a shortcut combo, e.g 3 finger tap,
map it to type “space”.

Now you can do a guesture on the trackpad to open the quick reference window.

I mapped a lot of gestures to various scrivener operations.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

Just to let you know that for the next update I have made it possible to drag from the binder (or corkboard or outliner) and drop documents onto the QuickReference toolbar icon. On doing so, any items dropped on it will be opened in QR windows. This doesn’t affect the selection in the binder or what is shown in the editor, and seems to work well.

All the best,
Keith

Very nice, and thank you.

(Been watching this with interest but no realistic suggestions.)

Phil

Love it, thanks!!!

Great, glad this is working well!
All the best,
Keith

I read this thread with interest but I’m not sure I understand everything. Anyhow I do desperately need myself a shortcut to open a document as a quick reference when I am in corkbaord view. I don’t like at all to have to press the icon in the menu bar or to drag the card to the icon, I definitely need a shortcut.
I wonder why nobody proposed a custom shortcut. Well, maybe this is impossible. I tried and it doesn’t work , probably because it involves both a menu (document>Open) and a submenu (As quick reference).
I am using the french version, so I typed the text in french for my custom shortcut (Ouvrir Comme référence rapide), that might be another issue.

Press the spacebar to open the selected corkboard item in a QuickReference window. If that isn’t working for you, open Scrivener > Preferences and click Navigation, then find the “Corkboard and Outliner Space Key Behavior” and set this to “QuickReference Panel”.

That was easy!
Thank you a lot for this tip.
I suppose I should spend more time in the preferences.