From one day to the other I am experiencing problems opening my Scrivener projects. When opening the app everything seems to function, but when I click the drop down for either recent or existing projects a “time glass” circle appears and everything freezes. I have tried to uninstall and reinstall with out luck. Have restarted the Mac a number of times as well.
Scrivener 3.4, MacOS 15.4.1
Does anyone experience similar and is there a way to troubleshoot. Otherwise this shall be the end of a long time relation with the Scrivener.
I’m not having any issues at all with that same combo, and given you’ve reinstalled Scrivener cannot think of a reason why Scrivener would be the issue.
Have you tried using File > Open. and selecting the project that way?
My first reaction is corrupted Preferences file. One way of trouble-shooting such things is to create a new user account on the machine (you can delete it afterwards if you need to) and try opening Scrivener there, creating a new test project and entering some text, etc. If that works, then it is likely the Preferences in your main user account.
You can bypass that and go straight to testing the Preferences in your man account.
Make sure Scrivener is not running and, in Finder, go to /Library/Preferences/ (If you’ve never accessed the Library before, in Finder, hold down the Option key and choose the Go menu; Library is about the 6th entry down, choose that and a Finder window will open on it).
Scroll down until you see com.literatureandlatte.scrivener3.plist
Drag that file out of the library and onto the desktop
Now open Scrivener; it will create a new preferences file with everything set to default. If you can now open your project and work on it, you’ll need to reset all your preferences and bin the file on your desktop.
If it still doesn’t work, I’m not sure what can be going wrong. You can restore your original preferences file into the library and bin the new one which was created.
The only other thing I can think of is to wonder if you have recently installed any other software which might be causing a conflict.
I hope someone more knowledgeable will be along to help if resetting the preferences like that doesn’t solve it.
Have you tried holding down Option and choosing File > Close Project and Clear Interface Settings?
Or holding down Option and choosing File > Save and Rebuild Search Indexes?
Apart from that, I can only suggest opening a support ticket, and looking to see if there is any log in Console that you could include to help the team diagnose the problem.
Thank you, once again. Unfortunately nothing works. I send the issue to support yesterday. I hope to solve it. I have used Scrivener for more than ten years and is in the middle of writing a book (in addition to a bunch of smaller projects). Everything is paused right now while waiting to see if I can run the projects from the Mac Book Pro again. If not, I’ll have to use another writing app as this is my main writing station.
Seems to be some kind of conflict between Dropbox and Scrivener. Realizing that Dropbox did seem to sync properly, I tried to delete and reinstall. That gave be a lot of problems, but in a period, where Dropbox was unable to get properly started, Scrivener seemed to work. No Dropbox is back (but still not syncing) and Scrivener freezes again. Strange! Mikkel
I understand that from your perspective. It is part of my use case for Scrivener to sync between devices, so it does not solve my problem. I’ll try dropbox.
And just to specify. It is not enough to close Dropbox to make it work; Scrivener was only working, when Dropbox was unable to start my account at Dropbox.
Per my response to your support query, you might also check your iCloud settings. If both services are trying to sync the same project, that could definitely cause problems.
Thank you. I have now excluded the Dropbox folder from the TimeMachine. That seems to have stabilized Scrivener. Have never been a problem. Now I just have to find out, if it’s sync’ed project that I am opening. I think to.
Dropbox still does not work, but that not your issue
