Does Scrivener have an ability to log files as to time open, in use, and closed. I want to go back and reconstruct the time spent on a project. There must be. I say that because Scrivener does everything else a writer needs done. Thanks
Welcome to the forum and Scrivener, Jim.
As of today, the answer to your question is “No”. As you may know, there are loads of timers and time-trackers available on the Mac App Store and elsewhere on the Internet - I’ve tried lots, and all have pluses and minuses of one kind or another. (Currently, for what it’s worth my favourite is Tyme 2 (http://tyme-app.com)).
It will keep track of writing progress in the future, but not nearly to the level you’re describing. It would be more like a summary of your word count progress over days, months or years, whatever it takes. It won’t care if it took you 10 files to write 900 words or 50 files, for that day’s log entry.
I don’t think a greater level of detail would be necessary for most things, and indeed in a program like Scrivener the concept of opening and closing things in the binder is rather foreign. Yes technically a file is opened on the disk the first time you view it in a session, but after that point it resides in memory until a long period of time has passed (I believe 48 hours) without touching it once, or when you close the project of course. You couldn’t track save events as a close event, because that happens to whole swathes of scheduled files whenever you pause long enough to sip some tea. A file you’ve been editing for hours may have been saved dozens of times.
There are other issues with the fluidity of how content is handled in Scrivener—to the point where thinking of these chunks of text as “files” is limiting. If I select a hundred of them and form a Scrivenings session, are they all “open” now, at once? If I flip over to something for a second to fix a detail and then jump back with history and continue working for another hour, is that three sessions, or two (or is it 201 sessions, since we “closed” 100 files to view one, then opened 100 to rebuild the session)? What if you have a some background material in the other split open for five days in a row, is that a five day long editing session?
Something like that would make more sense in a straight up repository of files with defined start/stop actions when editing content (like open a window then close a window).
Thanks very much for these insights. More than sufficient.