What Is Your Favourite Scrivener Feature, and What Is The Most Useful Feature?

My favourite Scrivener ‘feature’ is a kind of meta feature - that the Scrivener interface is organized in such a way that it provides flexible and easy access to all documents/folders.

This is really useful, but I would probably count the group of status features as being most useful for me (including word count).

What are your favourite and most useful features?

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No question: split windows and Scrivenings mode.

:slightly_smiling_face:

Mark

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Total Target, Total Wordcount + Total progress bar in Outline, this combined with split layout helps me to control the less-written scenes and navigate among them.

Thanks for the reply, srebrnafh.

I find these features useful, too, especially the split screen.

Thanks for your reply, Mark.

As most of what I use Scrivener for is working on translations between Chinese and English, sharing the projects with my collaborator in China, those two features are absolutely essential. I always feel for Windows users, as the devs still are looking for a way to get Scrivenings working the way it does on the Mac.

Other features, like targets and wordcounts which Srebrenath finds most useful, don’t figure for me or my collaborator.

I often think I probably use fewer of Scrivener’s features than anyone else on the forum, even though Scrivener has been my main tool since January 2007!

:slight_smile:

Mark

Document Split/Move/Merge. For me, this is the number one reason why I started using Scrivener in the first place.

Number two is the corkboard, especially the Scrivener 3 version that auto-fills from document contents.

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I really enjoy having all my research in it’s varied form in the binder - websites, pics, video and the like.

I also have multiple large monitors and really like using the ‘Quick Reference’ and the split windows capability with windows open all over the place yet my manuscript is still right in front of me waiting whilst I procrastinate some more :wink:

Should add that all the windows are nice and neatly laid out - have to have some sense of orderliness :partying_face:

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Hi AussieDoc,
Thanks for your reply.

You make me realize that there are so many Scrivener features that I find useful and like that I should have eliminated the word “Favourite” from the title of this thread.

I, too, love having all of my research (as well as my writing) available in one ‘place’ (the Binder).

Hi Katherine,
I must use the Document Split feature more - thanks for mentioning it.

I did find it very useful on one or two occasions, but for some reason often end up taking a ‘longer route’ to do what can be accomplished with Document Split.

Thanks for this, Mark.

Funny :slight_smile: For me, Scrivenings are next to useless, since keyboard navigation in multi-document mode is painful, and there is no added value coming from it as it is.
The target and wordcounts however help me a lot when reviewing what parts of text need to be developed - it’s easy to spot documents that have only notes/oneliners and require expanding. And they also help me see if the acts of the story are balanced, since I split the narrative at the main crisis/milestone points.
But, to each their own :slight_smile: I don’t use multitude of features either - mostly the ones that help my OCD soul to feel in control of the chaos of creation.

I realise that because I’ve read the other thread. Scrivenings acts like a single document for most purposes, so, for instance, you can keyboard navigate and even select across binder document boundaries, something that you can’t do on the Windows version.

I do hope the devs find a way to implement Scrivenings fully in Windows.

:slightly_smiling_face:

Mark

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For me it depends on the project I’m working on. For one project: - corkboard, bookmarks for project; customizable metadata; revision mode and Quick reference. For this project I need to combine 1 to 10 documents parts into a pdf file email attachment. I can put the parts together in quick reference the compile to pdf.

For the other main project : Corkboard; metadata; project notes; then export as text.

For everything the binder / outline / sub-item/ folders etc. format to manage all the stuff that comes in.

Biggest problem, is lack of any reasonable Android tool that works with Scrivener does not exist, so I’m being forced to move a lot of stuff I’d rather do with Scrivener to a tool that supports both Android and Windows.

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You make a great point, Steve - I can see how it would depend on the project.

Thanks for your reply.

What are we Windows Scrivener users missing in Scrivenings Mode?

Do you mean in using Scrivner on iOS, or wanting there to be an Android version or something?

Compared to Mac, apparently a bunch. As discussed above, Scrivenings have a lousy keyboard navigation (pg up/dn works like ctrl+home/end), you can’t select text across document boundaries… Which, from what I hear, works on Mac, due to a different underlying framework used to build the application.

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As I understand it, on MacOs Scrivenings mode is “open a single editor control and dynamically link in all the Scrivenings that should be displayed.” As a result, it feels like you’re editing a single document – you can select past a document boundary, navigate through the entire Scrivening view easily, etc.

On Windows, which uses Qt (and Qt doesn’t have the same thing), what we get is a stack of editor controls, one per document in the Scrivening view. This explains some of the funkiness – you can’t select across the document boundary because you’d actually be selecting across editor control instances, etc.

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Like so:

:smiley:

Mark

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Thanks very much, srebrnafh.

I suppose ignorance is bliss for those of us who use Windows.