I am a bit surprised that nobody seems to have the recurring issue that I have:
It would be so awesome if Scrivener remembered the cursor position in ALL documents always.
I am very used to using web browsers, like most people are nowadays, and they have this wonderful ability to remember the position of the cursor in a document that you come back to.
It is really frustrating, I think, that I have to navigate back to where I were whenever I open another document and go back to a previous document. Especially, when reading the tutorial (that’s where I am at still)
Given how many hours your are “expected” to spend with Scrivener, I really think this is a very important wish. No matter how many pages you open, close, navigate to, and so on, Scrivener should, I think, restore the last page display (the cursor/scroll offset) so that you don’t get confused by having to do this all the time.
Being a software developer myself, I’d expect this feature to be nearly trivial to implement. A huge global dictionary of all document names mapping each document name to a position. If no position is present, the document is simply displayed from the very top. Even for gigantic projects, this should pose no significant overhead. We’re talking a few megabytes of RAM or so, I guess.
Obviously, the positions should be saved and restored across Scrivener sessions so as to make it seamless and pleasant to resume work on a Scrivener project.
No, and I did search for “remember”, but didn’t find the article you’re referring to
I may be a bit slow, but I fail to see how this would work seamlessly/automatically? Basically, I am used to an editor (SlickEdit, a programmer’s editor) that remembers the cursor position of every file so that I can reopen them six months later and still get to just where I left of. That’s what I want Scriverner to do, for every document in each project, so that you can return and immediately be back to right where you were.
Please don’t take this as a rejection of your link, I am just not sure yet if it will help me or not. I don’t seem to be able to get Ctrl-J (“Jump to Selection”) to work reliably on my Windows version of Scrivener (v1.5.1.1). It seems to me that Ctrl-J does nothing (even though I ensure the Editor window is selected when I hit Ctrl-J) and I still get positioned in a near random spot on each page, if I select a page in the Binder, scroll down a bit, select another page in the Binder, and then reselect the first page in the Binder again, then I am always placed somewhere unpredictable - not at the top nor at the position I were.
FWIW, I don’t expect or want Scrivener (or any other application) to remember my cursor position indefinitely. If enough time has passed, any further visits to the file will be for an entirely different purpose and the old location will be irrelevant. YMMV.
With respect to Scrivener specifically, I find that keeping the individual component documents pretty short is a better idea anyway, and scrolling through a thousand words is much less onerous than scrolling through ten or twenty thousand.
I respect that, so perhaps we can get an option, “Persistent cursor positions”, that can be explicitly enabled to provide this feature. I guess that to you, persistent cursor positions will be pain and to me a must. Luckily, there’s always a way to ensure everybody gets their way with an option
I think that my wish makes the more sense, the more files/documents you have If you have only one big document, like with Word, it is “okay” to be positioned where you were the last time, but if you have 250+ documents, you really need to be able to get back into position quickly.
Obviously, it doesn’t matter much after six months, but it was just an illustration of how my current editor works. I like that a lot because I’ve been used to it for decades, and it does provide a nice reminder about what you were doing the last time you looked at a particular project. As a software engineer, I’m very used to working on 117 different files and projects at the same time, hence my wish.
As for my note on implementation, with a dictionary/hash table, I guess the cursor position could be something as simple as a percentage with a sufficient number of digits (three or four). That way, it could work for non-text documents such as PDF files and images as well.
If you have 250 documents, getting back to the document you were in matters – and Scrivener does that. But getting back to the exact location within the document matters less if you have 250 1000-word documents rather than 1 250,000-word document.
Why argue? I believe my suggestion covers both of our use cases perfectly: You won’t loose anything and I’ll (and perhaps many others) will win a lot.
You might even try the perhaps-possibly-maybe coming “Persistent cursor positions” option yourself and perhaps, maybe discover that it is wonderful.
It is not a matter of either or. We can both easily get what we want
Scrivener already remembers the cursor position automatically, but there are one or two limitations which you may be consistently running into, depending on how you work. Note the explanation for why that is, at the end of this thread. I didn’t go into it in depth there, but there are technical complexities with storing the cursor position in Scrivenings view as well, once you start to consider all of the different scopes within which the canonical cursor position might be placed, up the chain of folders to the top level, never mind collections, that would make offsetting the value in real time difficult to do efficiently.
Since there is already a spiderweb of different threads on this, I’ll close this one and encourage any further conversation in previous threads.
