I would love to use the Outliner for actual outlining, but I’m not really getting along with it as a creative tool. The main showstopper for me is figuring out how I can add a new document and type the synopsis directly in the Outliner. I know I can add a new document with the Enter key, and type the title directly, but I can’t find a way to type the synopsis without having to mouse over to the Inspector’s Notes tab and type it in the Synopsis box there. It’s just too much mousing around when I’m trying to type fast when the ideas are flowing. Is there a keyboard shortcut to other tip do do this effieciently?
It sounds like you might need to turn the Synopsis field on, as it would ordinarily be a very natural extension from pressing Enter to make a new item, type in a title, press Enter again to go into the synopsis field, and then you’re done.
To enable it, use the View ▸ Outliner Options ▸ Title ▸ and Synopsis menu toggle. The whole field is treated as one text area, by the way, so you can very simply arrow between title and synopsis when you’re going back to edit a line. Since this is something that tends to be toggled a lot, there is also a button for them in the footer bar, along the right side, that looks like three outline rows.
By the way, there are very few things in Scrivener that require reaching for the mouse. Even opening the inspector and dropping the cursor straight into the index card can be done, via the Navigate ▸ Inspect ▸ Synopsis shortcut (hit it twice to first open the inspector if necessary). All of those shortcuts can be handy, as well as the ones in the adjacent submenu, “Focus”, for getting back to the editor.
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Thank you Amber, I do have the synopsis visible in the Outliner and I can use the cursor keys to up/down between title and synopsis but that doesn’t work if there isn’t a synopsis yet - the down key just drops down into the next document.
Thank you for the shortcut suggestion for hopping over to the Inspector. It’s ctrl-opt-cmd-I and ctrl-opt-cmd-E to get back again (though not back into the cell I was editing). That’s helpful, assuming I can stick at the task of memorising it, but still a bit clunky. Basically I’m trying to replicate the ease and speed of just typing a document with bullet points for scenes, or even using a spreadsheet. With a lot of customisation I’m getting close but this one obstacle makes it just not feel good as a creative space.
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I should add that I also tried all the shift-enter, ctrl-enter etc to see if one of those worked, but I didn’t find one.
Hmm, I can’t think of any reason for explaining why pressing Return wouldn’t go from the title line, to the synopsis (creating a new one if necessary), when typing in an outliner title field. There are no settings that would make that stop working.
The only variant is Opt-Return by the way, but don’t try that one! That forces a newline into the title field which, in most cases, isn’t at all desirable. 
That’s helpful, assuming I can stick at the task of memorising it, but still a bit clunky.
In addition to using the same three modifier keys for them all, we did try to put some mnemonics into these. ‘e’ is for Editor, ‘r’ is for Reference (the other editor split), ‘i’ is for Index Card, ‘b’ is for Binder, and then the tabs of the inspector just follow a kind of zipper pattern along the right hand home row position.
But ideally you should be able to write title and synopsis effortlessly in the outliner view!
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Thanks for insisting that it works. I must have tried it fifty times today, and the result was always the same as what you warned me against - that it would add a return into the title, no matter if I used the return key alone or any one of the modifiers. I’ve just done it again, just to prove to you it doesn’t work, and it’s started working. Now I can’t get it to not work.
Ah well, at least I learned some new shortcuts along the way. 
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Classic tech support results. 
Well hopefully it stays not not working.
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