I just wanted to tell the scrivener people that you’ve spoiled me. I spent ages organizing my novel, and all the folder capabilities are brilliant. Now I’m also organizing our family photos in folders on Windows. And it’s awful. I want the Windows folders to do all the things that the scrivener folders can do. Why can’t I select all and expand all the internal contents? Why must the folders always be at the top of the list, instead of interspersed with files? Why can’t I sort my folders manually, instead of only having their search criteria? Etc., etc. So if you guys could take over management of the Windows file explorer, that would be swell.
Thanks!
It’s a nice thought, but part of what makes Scrivener’s binder like that is how much it isn’t like a standard file system. Those have rules that exist well below the software you use to work with them, whether it be what comes with Windows or another third-party tool. There are rules like how directories are only ever that, and can never contain their own content, like files do, or how files cannot have items nested within them. There is no storage for defining a custom order for things (though that is something software can do on top of the file system—though more often in freeform icon views, rather than list views).
For example, click on a PDF or image in your binder, and in the main editor, use the View ▸ Corkboard menu command (Ctrl2 /⌘2). You’ll see an empty corkboard, click + in the footer bar, or press Enter, to make a new card. Now look over at the binder and see what happened: your PDF or image file turned into a “folder”! This is a neat way of taking notes about a particular resource, or even using a common image as a group for other related images. Everything can be nested in Scrivener, there are no folders, really, just some things that come prepackaged with an icon icon that looks like one.
