I love Scrivener and have just upgraded to Scrivener 2 which seems great. But I can’t find a way to customise the toolbar how I want it. I would like to have three separate larger buttons for Edit Scrivenings, Corkboard and Outliner. They were separate in the old version and, to my eye, they were clearer icons. I am someone who prefers words to pictures, and these little pictures don’t really look like the different modes to me. Underneath is the phrase ‘Group Mode’, which doesn’t mean much to me. I would prefer to see the words Edit Scrivenings under the first one, for instance.
Thanks for this great software. Tinker
There is no way to separate these, nor any plans to make them separate again. The button design in version 2 is meant to reflect the unified nature of the three different ways to view groups, hence “group modes”, a concept that seamless in version 1. There is no “Edit Scrivenings” any more, but rather one can view any selection of items as Scrivenings, or as cards, etc. In fact the leftmost button has two modes of operation. When viewing a container, such as a folder, clicking it will toggle between Scrivenings mode and viewing just that selected container’s text content. Furthermore when you are viewing individual documents, you’ll note the button changes to show only a single document instead of a stack of them. Just as with version 1, you can switch a single document to Corkboard view to add cards beneath it, causing it to become a group. Once you do that, the icon will change to a stack of papers.
It may take a little getting used to, but the new system allows for much greater flexibility and ease of moving around. For example, if you are writing in Scrivenings mode and want to quickly jump to another area of the session, as though there were a Table of Contents, you can just click the Outliner button. You’ll find the section you were typing in is highlighted in the Outliner already. Click on a different row, then back on the Scrivenings button, and you will find your cursor has been moved to the document you just selected. Or maybe you want to narrow down a Scrivenings session to just a few scenes. You can switch to Corkboard or Outliner mode as you prefer, Cmd-click to select the sections, and use the Documents/Open/in Editor menu command or its associated keyboard shortcut to narrow the view down to just those items. Now, go back to Scrivenings mode, and there you have a focussed writing session. When you’re ready to go back to the full session, just click the Back button to return to where you were before you narrowed things down.
Just a few ideas! I use these two myself all of the time actually, especially the “table of contents” trick, it’s a really fast way to zip around inside a larger body of text, and not something you could do at all in Scrivener 1.
Note also that you can choose to view the toolbar as text only, rather than icons–this saves some space and may suit you if you prefer words to pictures anyway. Here you’d see the text “View Mode” on the toolbar and clicking that will bring up a little menu with all the options as text: “Scrivenings | Corkboard | Outline”.