Scrivener keeps hanging

I’m having this issue on an almost daily basis. Scrivener will stop responding, I get the spinning wheel of death and have to choose Force Quit from the Apple menu (where it says Scrivener is not responding).

Could you tell me which version of Scrivener you have, please, and with which version of Mac OS?

Also, how big is the project, and what are you doing when Scrivener hangs?

Scrivener v 3.3.6 (16305) and Mac OS Sonama 14.6.1
It is not one specific document but it has happened on several
Projects tend to be quite sizable and often trying to cut’n’paste seems to set it off but sometimes it just does it immediately

How big is “quite sizable?” And how big are the individual documents? If you’re cutting and pasting within a single 50,000 word document, you’re quite likely to see performance issues. Scrivener is designed to work with much smaller chunks.

The whole file it is currently doing it on is 10.1MB
Not sure what you mean about individual documents? Each chapter is maybe 2K words
There are research files that contain pictures and words.
Basically using it for its intended purpose. I’ve been using Scrivener for years. This issue started happening in the past year

Those aren’t terribly large files and shouldn’t be giving you trouble.

In the last year, have you installed any kind of third party spelling and grammar checker or anything else that might be “watching” what you do in Scrivener?

If cut and paste sets it off, you might especially check for clipboard managers and software like that.

No nothing like that. And it is not always during cut n paste, sometimes it hangs the minute I open it - even before opening a file. I’m not doing anything diffferent from what I’ve been doing for several years

Have you done general system maintenance lately? That’s the kind of behavior you might see with something like a corrupted font cache. Here’s the cleanup software we recommend: Titanium Software | Operating System Utilities for Mac - Maintenance

It also wouldn’t hurt to reset Scrivener’s Preferences file, as explained here:
https://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb/macos-troubleshooting/resetting-preferences

1 Like