Hello, I’m new here. I’ve looked for an app that will allow me to have version control for the books I am writing, and Scrivener seems like the closest one to my needs, however, these 2 features are missing for me to make the purchase:
Option to enable auto snapshot every x characters or x minutes/hours (both, based on what happened first) - This will allow me to not only auto save, but have better version control management, without the need to think about when should I create a snapshot. For specific snapshots I can always give a better specific title.
Search through Snapshots by title (and perhaps date ranges, this could be more convenient than scrolling through all snapshots to reach a specific date)
When comparing Snapshots, I want to be able to better see all changes made, at a glance, more similar to how the ‘diff’ feature in GitHub looks. Highlighting the areas across the whole length of the page, and jump to the next change. At the I can only compare by scrolling through all of the text and look for text that is cyan colored, very unproductive and a non-realistic solution in my opinion.
Hello, welcome to the forum! Here are some features that match what you’re looking for, though one of them is a bit parallel to what you asked for specifically:
In the General: Saving options tab, tick the Take snapshots of changed text documents on manual save. That might sound like overkill, if you’ve got the habit of using save frequently from other programs—but that’s a habit worth breaking in Scrivener, since it autosaves as you work. Saving is mostly cosmetic, in other words—unless we add options to it like this one, that make it actually useful. The other option is in the Backup tab, where manual saving can also create a whole-project backup.
So it’s not every n minutes, but it’s really not that much of a bother to press Ctrl+S / ⌘S ever time you feel like you’ve done enough work to want to milestone it. In my opinion that’s a better approach anyway, as a strict interval has a higher chance of creating a lot of “noise” snapshots that are not worth keeping.
Try the Documents ▸ Snapshots ▸ Snapshots Manager command. Granted, it’s not a title-only search, but if your snapshot titles are sufficiently unique, it kind of can be. You can also search for dates in here, using the date search syntax described in Table 11.1, in the user manual PDF. This feature itself is documented in §15.8.5, The Snapshots Manager.
The comparison feature has keyboard shortcuts for jumping from one edit to the next, as we well as buttons (marked (c) in Figure 13.14). While in that section, scroll down a bit for the shortcuts.
On the Mac, you can run comparison mode in the main editors as well, which might be a little easier to do than in the inspector. Refer to §15.8.4, Comparing Changes in the Editors, for the details on that.
Lastly, if you find the default cyan hard to see, check the Appearance: Snapshots: Colors options tab, for the settings on these markings.