It would not currently be technically possible to show the full text in Scrivener’s outline view because the version of Apple’s NSOutlineView that I use does not support this. In the future I’ll be updating this to a newer version of NSOutlineView which technically would support any sort of control, including full text - however…
Even when I update Scrivener to use the newer version of NSOutlineView, it would not be feasible to show large rich text documents in it, because NSOutlineView is not really built or optimised for this sort of thing and would run horribly slow.
Technical limitations aside, this is really out of scope anyway. To view an outline in Scrivener along with the text, you can simply use scrivenings view on the right and the outline view on the left, and link the editors so that clicks in the outline on the left scroll scrivenings on the right to the selected document in the text (as suggested by Katherine). This allows for full text to be navigated using the outline.
Thank you very much for responding in detail. Thanks to yours and everyone else’s answered here, I’m coming to accept that the thing I’ve been pining for – a reproduction within Scrivener of the Microsoft Word Outline system – is not just an inconvenient, arbitrary omission (that could be corrected with a minimum of effort), but is, instead, a fundamentally different concept that’s foreign to Scrivener.
Obviously, I can still keep using MS Word Outlines…but what I’d rather do, is alter my work habits to take advantage of the far more powerful capabilities of Scrivener.
To that end – and, I apologize for the mundanity of the question – how do I set things up so that, when I click on a Binder item (with two editors open), I can most quickly get to a situation where 1) the entire outline structure is expanded in all views; 2) the left editor shows the Outline view and the right editor shows the Scrivenings view; 3) the editors are (as you say) “linked” so that selections in each take the other one to the same spot? (With both editors moving in tandem to the same spot)?
This is a common enough request to have a built-in layout:
Window -> Layouts -> Three-Pane (Outline).
View -> Outliner Options to add or remove columns from the outline pane. View -> Outline -> Expand All will expand all sections in either the Outline or the Binder, depending on where the cursor is located.
See Section 12.3.3 in the manual for more information about the built-in layouts, including the specific commands that this one enables.