Typewriter: inserted line invisible/overwriting final line

With typewriter scrolling on, if you insert a new line immediately before the last line of the document by hitting return, it causes the final line of the doc to disappear until something prompts a redraw of the screen such as typing, or scrolling the screen. It feels like the typewriter scrolling is getting in a pickle with the new line, and scrolling it over the last, or scrolling all the window up instead of scrolling in opposite directions either side of the newly inserted line. It’s not a bug with the underlying text, because it gets redrawn properly as soon as something else prompts it to update.

This only happens when you insert a line immediately before the last one; inserting a line anywhere else or adding to the end of the document doesn’t cause this. It doesn’t happen every time you do this, but it seems to get stuck doing it, and then something unsticks it (not sure what !) and then it gets stuck doing it again.

It’s purely cosmetic as far as bugs go, but it is a bit disconcerting that you go to insert a thought and it appears to overwrite content.

I’m using dark mode, if that makes any difference.

What version of Scrivener are you using, and does this happen on both your windows and mac platforms? Which version of mac & windows are you running? This will help with a diagnosis.

I can’t help with an answer, but I seem to remember seeing a (bug?) that was fixed that had to do with a specific os/scrivener combo.

MacOS: Sonoma 14.5
Mac Scrivener 3.3.6

I’ve only started seeing it on my Mac scrivener since upgrading my Mac last month from something pre-BigSur and a similar vintage copy of Scrivener (~2019?).

macOS 13 to a lesser extent, and 14 have been a real mess when it comes to text editor performance and cosmetic reliability—spell check drawing its markers incorrectly or not pulling up the menu options when it should, has also been a huge pain. These are not problems exclusive to Scrivener (I have even seen text redraw errors in TextExit, which is so basic most programmers could make most of it in an hour or so). For the most part we just have to hope Apple fixes them at some point. There are lots of symptoms of this problem, the one you found seems to be one of them. I have seen it happen in the middle of the screen as well, with no typewriter scrolling.

In the meanwhile, we have discovered that turning on the current line highlight setting in Appearance (for all of the text editors you use frequently: Main Editor, Quick Reference and Composition) can in our testing cause the problem to vanish. Perhaps this feature involves redraw the text more aggressively to insert such a graphical element into it, and this negates the problems that the more economical and resource-friendly approaches exhibit.

If you don’t like the look of it, go into Appearance: General and switch off the option to draw a border around the line highlight, then for each editing mode you use, visit its Color tab, click on the picker for the current line highlight, and set its opacity to 0%. Even invisible, the extra drawing this setting entails seems to improve things.

We’ll be taking a look at it to see if there is anything we can do to fix it. Maybe slowing everyone down a small bit by having this setting always on, but invisible if the settings are off, is a rough and dirty way to fix it.

1 Like

(Spammer anonymized. Thank you for playing!)