I’m running issues in the ability to undo mistakes (command+Z) in the binder section. I’m thinking this feature doesn’t exist but I feel it’s a must have. I organize sections of my stories in the binder section (it’s part of my workflow and it’s easier this way) but I can’t undo anything incase my restructuring doesn’t work out.
I feel like this is a must have with scripts. The notecard system is great, but scenes get shifted around a lot of the time during the heat of a creative moment and sometimes it doesn’t work out.
You should be able to undo the last simple change made to the Binder, for example if your trackpad glitches out and you accidentally drop Act III into a scene, you should be able to undo that. It’s just one step though and doesn’t work for everything (split/merge, notably). It was a bit difficult to get even the single level working, as I recall. Maybe that will be easier in the future though, as the underlying coding mechanisms for these types of views are changing (at least for Yosemite forward), but I’m just speculating.
Now on that specifically, I would never rely upon undo mechanisms to preserve important information like that, in any program. That is mainly just based upon my experience with general unreliability of undo in software in general. Undo should be reserved for “oops”, not relied upon as a tool for what amounts to storing data states temporarily.
I would suggest other mechanisms that have been designed specifically for that purpose (or are just generally useful for that). Collections can be really handy for this kind of thing, when experimenting with the narrative structure of a particular section (its flat-list approach limits its usefulness for multi-section edits). For example you can select all of the scenes in an act, drop them into a collection, and then work on them there. You can seamlessly edit the original text documents while feeling free to move them around into a different order. If it doesn’t work out, just delete the Collection. If it works, then select everything and drag them back to the Binder tab and drop them into the folder they came from. The new order will be used in the Binder. Collections were in fact a response to requests for “structural snapshots”, even though the ultimate design lends itself to to all sorts of usages beyond just that.
Duplication can also be useful for this type of experimentation, when the structure is more complicated than a simple folder of files.
I think the issue is when I move something in the binder folder, then switch to the text. It basically disregards the actions done in the binder folder. I hope that changes.
Yes, this is the sort of stuff that would be nice, but is technically very difficult, as I understand it, with the current coding frameworks for providing view-specific undo capabilities. There is a lot of stuff like this that remains on the some-day list, should a solution arise.
Moderator note: moved to Scrivener support from Scapple.