In other programs the style menu (in Word, it’s in the ribbon, and in Pages it’s called the “Style Drawer”) both show the style presets in a WYSIWYG fashion; that is, if “Heading 1” is defined as 14pt, italicized, “Hoefler Text”, then that’s exactly what it shows up as. I think this would be a BIG improvement over Scrivener’s current style presets menu, where currently we have to either guess or remember exactly what we wanted our Title, Sub-Heading, etcetera to look like. Just my two cents.
Could we have keyboard shortcuts for presets too please? In Pages you can assign them as ‘hot keys’ and choose between the ‘F’ keys. (The drawback is that if you make a template it doesn’t remember these hot keys).
For Scrivener it would be useful to be able to assign a keyboard short cut to a heading, sub heading etc preset style and apply without having to go to a menu and a sub menu. Much faster and easier.
You can already do this with the general OS X hotkey system. Anything that has a position in a menu can be given a shortcut in the Keyboard preference pane, under the shortcuts tab.
Good point, I overlooked that but it would be nice to have it in Scrivener. On a larger but later theme, it would be good to have customisable short cuts that you could save as a text file (like Illustrator) and load in to other macs with app on them (not like Illustrator). But that’s a whole other request…
You can copy shortcuts from one Mac to another with a little technical know-how. They are just stored in the general Preferences .plist file, in the NSUserKeyEquivalents array. These are encoded into basic ASCII friendly equivalents. So the array contains a list of string/value keys, where the key name is the menu name and the value is the shortcut. An example form my system is “First Revision” : “^1”, or Ctrl-1. “Hide Collections” : “@~^c” is another, or Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-C—which is incidentally also bound to “Show Collections”, so that I can toggle the tabs with the same shortcut. So in short you could open this file in the plist editor and copy and paste the array from one prefs file to another.
But you’re right, some kind of import/export for that could be useful, because although splicing bits of plist files together isn’t too difficult, it isn’t the sort of thing most writers like to bother themselves with. Whether or not is would be feasible to do that with Apple’s closed system is another matter. As for reinventing the shortcut assignment wheel, I’ve seen a few other Cocoa programs do this and frankly I don’t get it. What’s the appeal of assigning hotkeys using 15 different UIs (hidden in probably 15 different places since there are no standards for where such a thing should hang off of the menu system—or even if it is in the menu system at all and not buried in a palette or preference window) in 15 different programs as opposed to 1 UI for 15 different programs?
Ah, wow didn’t know that about the plists. Illustrator actually asks you to save your set with a name but I don’t think it makes them available to the user as a simple text file.
BB Edit has started looking for settings in Dropbox. They suggest Library/ Application Support/ BB Edit be made as folders in Dropbox and that this is a new common standard for other developers, then you could load from there on whatever macs you use which have Dropbox linked.
I like this idea and wish you could use this for text substitution lists. Its a faff having to re enter them machine by machine (its bad enough having to do them for Pages as well as the system on one machine) there is a workaround I remember from tidbits… (tidbits.com/article/10567) haven’t tried it for a while.
Thanks for the info I will look into this a bit further
It’s especially annoying for me, because I routinely end up wiping my preferences file, probably far more than the average person, because I use alpha builds and such, and intentionally try to trigger bugs all day. So I get snarled up .plist files more rapidly than the average person. Reset the application’s .plist file and poof, all shortcuts are gone if I forget to copy them out first.
There are certainly pros and cons to the system. I think it’s fantastic that we basically have full hotkey control on a Mac for some hobbyist’s 10 minute utility all the way up to professional software. I do wish that Apple stored system impressed settings into a separate .plist file, though, given the relative fragility of the Cocoa plist I/O. It would make it easier to transfer these hotkey lists between machines, too.
I wouldn’t recommend wiring Scrivener’s .plist file to a central Dropbox copy, by the way. Unless all of your computers are identically configured, with projects all located in precisely the same paths, same user name—you’ll probably run into problems doing that. It’s support folder, on the other hand, can be sym linked to Dropbox—which will make compile presets, project templates, formatting presets and other goodies available everywhere. That’s a good way to distribute your automatic backups to the whole Db network, too.