Reveal in collection rather than in binder

Scrivener
,
1

When you are working in scrivenings mode with a selection of documents in the binder, you can use Navigate > Reveal in Binder to have the binder show the document you are currently working in. In addition, the selection of multiple documents remains the same, meaning that the scrivenings remain the same.

When you are in a collection instead of a binder, however, using Reveal in Binder leaves the collection and switches the left column back to the binder. You also lose the selection of documents you had been working on in the scrivenings.

Is there a way that I haven’t found yet to do a “Reveal in collection” instead of a “Reveal in Binder”.

AmberV mentioned a “new reveal command” back in 2017 but I can’t seem to find anything that matches that description.

Thanks,
Matthew

2

Right-clicking the editor header will give you the option to Reveal in Collection, with a submenu of all the collections containing the document.

1 Like
3

I assume that is a mac based option. On windows it is go to Collection but not limited to Collections the editor file is in.

4

Thanks to both of you! I wasn’t aware of this option until today. And yes, I’m on a Mac.

I tried that out, and I see where it almost gets me what I want. But there is still a difference between doing this in the binder and in a collection:

In the binder:

  • I select a group of documents to create a scrivenings view
  • I work in the editor window and come to a document X
  • I want to see where document X is in the binder so I do “Reveal in Binder”
  • group of selected documents in the binder disappears, and the binder shows document X

In a collection:

  • I select a group of documents to create a scrivenings view
  • I work in the editor window and come to a document X
  • I want to see where document X is in the binder so I do “Reveal in Collection” > the collection I’ve been working in
  • nothing changes in the left panel (i.e. I see the group of selected documents), the document I’m looking for is listed but it is not highlighted as being the one I searched for

Is there any way to tweak this a little bit to have the document I’m looking for highlighted in the left panel?

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5

Yeah, there is a bit of the contradiction there in the established behaviour otherwise, for that contextual menu. Most of those commands in there work upon the right half of the editor header bar, or the specific chunk of text within a session. If I use that menu to take a snapshot, for example, it will snapshot the section my cursor is in.

However this one menu command seems to be using the group as the target, which is in this case the multiple selection as a whole. You can better see what is happening if you click in the collection sidebar background, to dismiss the selection (this won’t abandon the scrivenings session), and then try the Reveal in Collection command. The whole multiple selection will be recreated.

I would tentatively say that is a bug, or at the least a confusion in the design, since as I say, for everything else in this menu that deals with actions taken upon things, it targets the text chunk the cursor is in.

In Outliner and Corkboard, on the other hand, this right-click menu always targets the group. And that makes more sense, because there is no left/right side to the header bar text at that point, it is very clearly the group you are working with, not whatever you have selected inside of the group (and multiple selections have a very limited number of things you can do with them, being a temporary state).

Well, the workaround is to hit ⌘4, to isolate that chunk of text in the editor by itself, then use the reveal in collection contextual menu command. When you are done, ⌘[ will bring you back to the multiple selection.

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6

Thanks, @AmberV, for the details and the workaround. It’s a bit clumsy, but it might be easier to learn that procedure than to deal with the situation I described.