If you bring up the Scratch Pad with the key combo in another program and then Cmd-Tab back to Scrivener it does not change windows (ie, the other program sits on top, although the menu bar says Scrivener is the active program).
Also, if you click in Scratch Pad from another program (say Firefox), the menu bar says Firefox is active, but if you hit Cmd-Q, Scrivener quits. Especially frustrating if you didn’t realize the cursor is active in Scratch Pad and you really wanted to quit the other program.
These two things didn’t really seem like bugs, just odd behaviors. Any way to fix or clarify? It’s confusing to have to figure out where the cursor is active.
This is just because the scratch pad is a floating window, so the behaviour may seem a little odd but there’s no other way to achieve it. Basically as a floating window, it’s not a “main” window. This allows it to appear over other programs, even though it’s part of Scrivener. But when it’s active, so is Scrivener, even though the rest of Scrivener might not be visible. So cmd-Q will quit Scrivener.
Ok. I request that this behavior be made more clear in the tutorial (which I did check before posting). It isn’t really mentioned at all, and it’s not common knowledge. I see it briefly in the manual, but as that loads as a 400+ page PDF, I don’t often check it (also kind of expect that the tutorial and manual will have the same info).
My bf pointed out that with the first behavior I mentioned (hot-key Scratch Pad, Cmd-Tab back to Scrivener) the Cmd-tilde combination will cycle into the Scrivener window.
(On a side note, there is a comment visible in the manual text:
“You can access it from the Window>Show Scratch
PadDavid: Are the shortcuts for Win and Mac correct? Appears to be ‘Ctrl-Shift-K’ for
Win.menu ( – >), or you can use the system Dock…”
PDFs pick up track changes/comments from word processing programs even if comments aren’t visible on the screen when the document is converted.)
I like the Scratch Pad feature, it’s just taking a little time to get used to, especially since it looks the same as the “QuickRef” windows but acts differently.
For originally different reasons, I’ve set up my system with a custom keyboard shortcut to reactivate Scrivener. So for me on my system, no matter what I’m doing or what application I’m in, if I hit cmd-k Scrivener jumps to the front (opening if need be)
Would that work for you?
If so, my steps are to use Spark (It’s free - link below) and set up a new shortcut as follows:
