On occasion, I have inadvertently clicked the Scrivenings button when positioned on a high-level folder containing lots of files with an enormous amount of text, in aggregate. Poor Scrivener “goes out to lunch” (some lunch break!) while I sit there, ruefully twiddling my thumbs for several minutes. It would be VERY nice if Scrivener could issue a warning prompt in these situations, offering the user a chance to bail out. If this is too much work for its priority level, here’s a slight variation that should be easier: If the Scrivenings module had a running character count or even a timer, it could issue a prompt if it passed some threshold, once again allowing the user to bail out early.
What should really happen is that it doesn’t block the interface. Since v2.0 of the Mac version, when scrivenings is loading, you see a loading indicator but you can click away at any time; you don’t have to wait for the scrivenings session to load before you can switch to another document or mode. Overhauling scrivenings on Windows is a huge job but it is also a priority for its own v2.0.