In most of my Scrivener files/scenes, etc. if I do a “find” search for a particular word or phrase, it searches the entire document from the cursor position to the bottom. If it doesn’t find the word/phrase there, it starts over again and the top, then searches the rest of the document.
However, in one particular document (some notes for a rewrite) it searches from the cursor position down to the document’s bottom, then stops. If I want to search from the top of the document, I have to move the cursor to the top of the document and search again.
I’m guessing there’s some setting I accidentally toggled off to make this happen. Anyone know how to toggle it back on?
I’ve seen one or two reports of this, but as yet do not know the cause. Here are a couple of diagnostic tools to use:
In the General preference table, enable Show internal error alerts at the very bottom. If you get a pop-up window with an error message when this problem occurs, copy and paste into a .txt file and attach that to a response.
Open Console.app from the Applications/Utilities folder on your Mac and leave that running in the background. Again, if you experience the problem, switch over to that and copy and paste any messages from Scrivener (you can search for that in the toolbar to help weed out other system messages).
A few questions:
If you press Cmd–8 you will switch the current text item you are editing to scriptwriting mode (don’t worry, you can switch it right back with the same shortcut and nothing will be harmed). The key thing I’m curious about is whether that works—if you get a system beep or not, and if it works, do you see a overlay message appear letting you know you’ve switched modes? When search wraps around, as you probably know, a similar overlay with a curly arrow appears to help you know this has happened. If for some reason that is failing, we would expect the scriptwriting warning to fail as well.
Do you use the search window to click the Next/Previous buttons, or do you use the equivalent Cmd-G and Shift-Cmd-G shortcuts?
What happens if you switch to another document and then come back and try searching again?
And of course, let us know what your Mac OS X version is, along with Scrivener.
I enabled “Show internal error alerts” and re-created the problem. No pop-up window.
Left console open, didn’t see any Scrivener messages there.
You are right that I get a warning beep and no curvy arrows that would show me search has wrapped. However, I do get a message showing me I’ve switched to scriptwriting mode and back.
I use both cmd-f/cmd-g and the window. Same results with both.
This particular document always has the same problem over multiple days, switching to other documents and back.
Thanks for checking those things. What about different projects? Does this problem only happen in the one project you’re currently working on, or everwhere? I would test with the Interactive Tutorial (Help menu) and see if you can do a full wrap search there.
If it does appear to be project-based, there is another set of preferences which are stored in each individual project—these can sometimes get jammed up as well. Instead of just outright deleting the file, please send us a copy of it if clearing the project settings resolves the problem. It might be there is something in that file that will allow us to reproduce the bug on our end if we slot it into a test project.
(Note you might want to save your project settings to a layout, via Window/Layouts/Manage Layouts… first.)
Close the project and locate it in Finder.
Right-click on the project and select Show Package Contents from the contextual menu.
Drill down into the Settings subfolder within your project.
Drag the “ui.plist” file to the Desktop.
Re-open the project and check to see if the problem is gone.
Doesn’t seem to happen in different projects, but I didn’t check every document in every project. (Though it is starting to affect more documents in this project.)
And… your solution worked!!! How do I send the offending plist?
So trashing the preferences works, but it keeps messing up again, so I have to throw the preferences out just about every day. Any suggestions for how to make it stop happening?
I’ve only seen this problem happen to one other person (and I’m not entirely sure, to be honest, if they are the same problem). To date I have absolutely no idea what causes it because of its rarity. If you can provide any information as to repeating patterns that might indicate the origin, I’d love to hear it. Just be very aware of what you do with a project window for a bit—anything could be significant, even resizing the window. When you find a sequence that seems to work 100% of the time, create a temporary account on your Mac, log in with completely vanilla settings in both Scrivener and the Mac, and see if it still happens. If it does, you’ve probably nailed it!