As I understand it, my licence entitles me to run my copy of Scrivener on my iMac and also on my Macbook Pro.
I’m in the process of writing some little bash programmes to copy my setup from one to 'tother as I move around and then arrive back home. The idea is to copy my data and also my Scrivener preferences between the machines. So just to check if I’ve got this right:
• once the extras are installed in Application Support they only change if I create more templates?
• there are just the 2 files in ~/Library/Preferences to worry about:
com.literatureandlatte.scrivener.plist & com.literatureandlatte.scrivener.LSSharedFileList.plist ?
I don’t suppose there’s any way to run Scrivener as a ‘mobile app’ - i.e. off a usb stick using its own preference files? That would be really handy.
By the way, I’m very pleased to be using an English app - being recently moved to Norwich myself, it’s nice that the app didn’t use too many codemiles getting to me…
One issue with doing that is if your username is not precisely the same on both systems. It’s not a huge issue. It will just mean that your preferred default new project folder, last save location, and things like that might routinely get lost. There might be some other problems with doing this as well. Generally it is recommended to use the feature which lets you save preferences into a file, and then load that on the second machine.
You can leave the LSSharedFileList one alone though. That just stores the recently loaded projects, which will probably not be the same on both computers anyway.
Hmm, not really. I suppose one way of going about it, if both computers are bound to always have Internet access, is to use symbolic links and DropBox. You won’t find many complex Mac applications that can do the “portable application” thing, though—as it basically means abandoning nearly every Apple guideline on how Mac applications should behave. I usually only see options like this for Java-based programs.
Of course, another thing you may find is that after a while, your preferences won’t be changing that much! With a new application, of course things are volatile as you find new options and settle in, but honestly my Scrivener preferences don’t really change much any more. Constantly keeping this updated between two computers and potentially losing path-based preferences every time you switch might be more hassle than the periodic adjustment here and there, and using a save-file to transfer them.
Fair do’s - as it happens, my user name and boot volume names are the same on both macs, so that wouldn’t be a problem. but I hadn’t even got down deep enough in to the app to know there was a save/load prefs option . As you say, once I’ve got it how I want it, it’ll settle down - just at the moment I’m faffing around with colours and fonts and rulers and styles and all that stuff, so I want to be able to transfer that easily.
Thanks for pointing out the load/save prefs option. Getting there, slowly.
I usually only see options like this for Java-based programs.
. As you say, once I’ve got it how I want it, it’ll settle down - just at the moment I’m faffing around with colours and fonts and rulers and styles and all that stuff, so I want to be able to transfer that easily.