I was a long-time emacs user before I switched to Scrivener about a year ago. There aren’t many features I can’t do in Scrivener, but here’s one that bugs me.
Sometimes, I’d like to know where I am in a document. For example, if I am on the 60th line of a 100-line document, I want to know I am 60% from the top.
You can almost vaguely guess this with the size of the scrollbar in a document. But in emacs, the status bar at the bottom of a file would say something like “60%(60,1)” to note that I’m on the 60th line, the first column of a document.
This is useful when I’m, say, working on a single-file short story, and I want to know where the 1/3 and 2/3 mark is located. Right now, the only real way I can do that is split the story into three files, and then look at the wordcounts for each. Is there some other way? Or could there be an option to display this next to the word and character counts at the bottom of a document?
This is something that strikes me as more useful in a WYSIWYG editor, when such things as ‘lines’ are a defined quantity.
I’d also argue that where you are in the document is only of value when you have finished that document. Imagine the different ways of writing a document:
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You start at “Once upon a time” and keep going to “lived happily ever after”.
Under this scenario, your counter would always say ‘100%’ - not that helpful.
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You are an avid corkboarder: Every idea you have is a seperate index card. Some will make the final cut, some won’t. You re-order them to re-imagine your vision constantly.
Under this scenario, your counter might say ‘80%’ when writing something that could end up being anywhere in the final piece.
The main uses for such indicators are in layout programs and such the like, and your own suggestion of just looking at the scrollbar should give you all the comfort you need for 1/3 or 2/3 type information once you have started to combine your seperate snippets into a master document… something you don’t ever actually need to do in Scrivener, BTW.