[Windows] Improvement suggestion to personal words list

Scrivener Wish List
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For anyone interested in making the words list synced across multiple devices, here is a little guide.
It works for ANY kind of file with ANY cloud service.

!!Safety precaution!! You are the sole responsible for any data loss. This guide is provided as-is. Always backup your files before attempting at doing any of this stuff.

  1. Locate the file you want to share. In this case, it’s
    C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Local\LiteratureAndLatte\Scrivener

  2. Copy the file wordlists.ini to your locally synced cloud folder of choice.
    After that, take note of the new path by selecting the new file and clicking “Copy path”
    image

  3. Delete the original file (yes, you heard me, but you shouldn’t be much worried. You did another backup before, right?)
    C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Local\LiteratureAndLatte\Scrivener\wordlists.ini

  4. From within the above folder, where you deleted the words list, type the following in the explorer path.
    Type cmd . and hit Enter

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    Command prompt should appear.

  5. Inside the command prompt window type mklink wordlists.ini, then add a white-space and press the right button of your mouse. This should paste the path you copied at step 2.
    The command line should look like this:

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    image1095×172 7 KB

  6. Hit Enter. If you did it correctly, a new wordlists.ini should appear in the folder C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Local\LiteratureAndLatte\Scrivener\.
    If it doesn’t, you might need to run the command prompt as an administrator. I won’t post how to for now. If somebody needs help on this, just ask.

That’s it! Your words list is now synced in cloud.

Explaination: What you have just created is a soft-link to the file contained in your cloud folder. Think of it as an advanced version of shortcuts. Whenever Scrivener reads from/writes to the wordlists.ini, it’s redirected to the linked file in a trasparent way, thus reading/writing to the file your cloud client (Dropbox, OneDrive, …) is monitoring.
IF you set it up correctly, it’s 100% safe. Scrivener will never know what happened… :grin:

Here is an extensive guide to symbolic and hard linking.

Happy linking.

EDITED: I changed the guide from hard to soft linking, because Scrivener seems to delete and recreate the wordlists.ini EVERY time you add a new word. If hard linking, this means you actually deletes the alternate identity of the file and recreate a new copy of it, disconnected from the one you stored in your cloud folder. Using soft link, instead, you force a transparent redirection, and Scrivener will operates directly on the file in your cloud folder, without deleting the soft link (aka symlink)

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