As I’ve continued to work with Scrivener, I’ve noticed that the save last position feature can be both helpful and not so helpful. It’s definitely great that it saves the position of the last document you worked on. This is especially nice for when going back and doing editing work. It gets a little awkward however when it remembers the saved position of every document (or at least a lot of them based on my experience). What happens is that on the second time of editing a long project, every document I click on automatically jumps to the bottom (which is of course that last place I looked at during the first edit).
To be honest, I’m not sure what would be the best option here. Part of me thinks saving the position of only the last edited document might be best, but others may think otherwise. Perhaps if nothing else, this could be configurable as to how many documents it remembers this for? It would be good to hear what other thoughts people have about this when doing multiple revision work on large, multi-document projects.
You can easily jump from one end of a document to the other with the key combination [ctrl]+[home] to go to the start of the document and [ctrl]+[end] to go to the end.
I would tend to prefer if I returned to the last place I left off on each document, although being able to change this document by document would tend to make more users happy. For very long documents, it can be tedious to keep going to through the document to find the place you last worked (for some of us, just remembering where we left off is a challenge and multiple documents/long stretches between work sessions compounds this). Maybe some type of bookmark (or several of them) would be helpful. Thanks for letting us give input on the formation of such a great tool.
A version 2.0 feature on the Mac will work very well as bookmarks. They’re called inspector comments (or is that “annotations”?). Highlight a letter, word, phrase, etc… and then press a key combo (or toolbar button), and you get a note linked to that text in the inspector. It currently time & date stamps it with your name, and you can add any amount of text to the note. When you click on one of these inspector comments, it takes you to the text it is linked to, and works in Scrivenings mode, showing you all of the notes from the included documents.
Sorry for the “mac version tease”, but I know it can be nice knowing that a feature I want is coming, even if it’s a while in the future.
There’s also the actual text bookmark feature in the Mac version, eventually coming to Windows. But for the present, something else you might find helpful is using inline annotations for this and using code words to mark things, since you can do a Find by Formatting to jump to annotations and can narrow that by annotations containing specific words. So you could use “BM” to indicate your text bookmark and then use Find by Formatting (Ctrl-Alt-F, although this will change as Ctrl-Alt conflicts with typing some special symbols) to search for inline annotations containing “BM” to hop through your bookmarks in all your documents. (Essentially that’s what the Mac bookmarks are–inline annotations–but they’re integrated to give you some other options, like selecting the titled bookmark from the menu.)
A bookmark feature would be exactly what I’m looking for. Even if it’s a good while before we see it, knowing it’s coming is exciting. The saved places issue isn’t a big one, I justs wanted to get some thoughts out there on it while Scrivener was still in beta.
Just resist! They worm their way into your house with cuteness–it was only recently that they changed the startup icon from a smiling computer to a gray apple. Then once macs have infiltrated, they’ll take over everything. Didn’t you see “Terminator?!?”
I wanted to revisit this topic as it’s been a whole lotta years since this has been talked about.
I too am looking for a way that when I leave my screenplay screen to go… anywhere really, that when I go back to the screenplay, it puts me right where I left off. (currently you always go back to the very top of your screenplay) Now, to accomplish this you shouldn’t have to place bookmarks all over the place, or even just 1… you should be able to go to behaviors and check a box that says something like ‘return to where you left off’ something like that. It’s just an automatic boom, you’re there.
What I end up having to do, if I want to avoid this, is open every note, every character… any window that I might need, on my other monitor… which then of course is a lot of alt-tabbing. It’s inefficient.
To accomplish the goal it just seems like it would be so easy to have in the program. Maybe it’s there already now that it’s 2026 and the last this topic was talked about was 2011. Is it somewhere other than behaviors? Is it something that should be posted for future updates?
The expected behavior is that Scrivener should return to the previous cursor location. If that’s not what you’re seeing, could you elaborate on exactly what you’re doing?
Anywhere I have my cursor in the editor (that is the section where you type your screenplay right?) is not where it comes back to when I switch to anything else in the binder and back.
This is def a step forward. Jump to Selection can be assigned a hotkey, I’m just surprised there isn’t a checkbox for “start where you leftoff” something another, where it just simply puts your cursor where it was before you went to something else in the binder, and then back again.
Again, a good step forward, thank you for the help
<----- me smiling, writing in Scrivener
But for the present, something else you might find helpful is using inline annotations for this and using code words to mark things, since you can do a Find by Formatting to jump to annotations and can narrow that by annotations containing specific words. So you could use “BM” to indicate your text bookmark and then use Find by Formatting (Ctrl-Alt-F, although this will change as Ctrl-Alt conflicts with typing some special symbols) to search for inline annotations containing “BM” to hop through your bookmarks in all your documents. (Essentially that’s what the Mac bookmarks are–inline annotations–but they’re integrated to give you some other options, like selecting the titled bookmark from the menu.)
(sigh)… getting closer to buying a Mac every day…