Scrivener has many settings you can tweak to make the app work the way you want, and many that change its appearance in subtle ways.
When working on a long-form writing project in Scrivener, you spend hundreds of hours in the app. It’s best to work with an interface as comfortable as possible. Scrivener offers many options. You can use themes to alter the overall appearance of the app, or you can hide many of Scrivener’s interface elements to create a distraction-free writing environment.
There are also a number of settings you can tweak to change the way individual elements display, improving your experience in Scrivener. In this article, we look at 6 ways you can change Scrivener’s Appearance settings to tweak the way the app displays certain interface elements.
You can access all of these settings by choosing Scrivener > Settings (Mac) or File > Options (Windows), then clicking the Appearance tab.
Add lines to Notes
Lined paper is useful when you write by hand, and less useful in an app. However, adding lines to the Notes section of Scrivener’s Inspector can give this interface element a different feel, making it look more like a proper notepad. These can be especially useful if your notes are brief and not complete sentences.
To enable this (Mac only), in the Inspector & Notes section of the Appearance tab, check Draw notepad lines in document notes.
Highlight the current line in the Editor
When you’re revising or editing texts in any app, it can sometimes be hard to keep your eyes on the text after you’ve read a few thousand words. One way to make this easier is to have Scrivener highlight the line where your cursor is located in the Editor. This helps you focus on that line, making it easier to spot typos. As you revise or edit, you can use the down arrow key to move down a line at a time; the highlighting helps you isolate each line and more easily spot mistakes.
In the Main Editor section of the Appearance tab, click Options, then click Highlight Current Line. By default, Scrivener highlights text with a pale yellow color, but you can change this by clicking the Colors tab and choosing your own color in the Current Line Highlight section.
Change the way index cards display on the Corkboard
If you use the Corkboard to plan and organize your projects, you probably know that there are lots of options as to how the Corkboard displays index cards. It’s worth checking the Appearance settings to see some of the many options you can change.
For example, in the above screenshot, I’ve set titles to allow two lines (Mac only) and changed the Status Stamp opacity and color. Other options let you change the minimum font size to squeeze more text into index cards (Mac only); arrange cards from right to left, if you work in an RTL language (Mac only); change fonts for photograph titles and status stamps; and choose colors for backgrounds and status stamps.
For more on using Status Stamps, see Three Ways to Mark the Status of Items in Your Scrivener Project.
Outliner options
Scrivener’s Outliner is a powerful tool that lets you plan and organize your project. Together with the Binder and Corkboard, the Outliner reflects changes you have made in your project, allowing you to use all three methods of viewing your project according to your needs.
By default, the Outliner displays text in a bland way, but some appearance options let you change this.
Above, I’ve used the settings in the Outliner section of the Appearance tab to add horizontal grid lines, vertical grid lines, and alternating row colors. These changes make it easier to scan an outline. You can also change fonts, set different colors for the Outline’s background, grid, titles, and synopses, and adjust the row spacing. It can be helpful to make some of these changes so it’s easier to view.
Change Scrivenings separators
Scrivenings view lets you view multiple documents from your Binder as if they are one long document. You can select a folder, or select multiple files, and Scrivener displays all their contents in the Editor, with separators between each file. By default, Scrivener uses a dashed line to separate files in Scrivenings view.
In the Appearance settings for Scrivenings, you can change these separators to corners, dividers, or bookish, both for standard mode and for screenwriting mode.
This is a subtle change, but some writers find this to be helpful when they use Scrivenings.
Page view
By default, Scrivener’s Editor shows your text on a continuous background, like many word processors. But Scrivener also lets you use page view, which shows your text on a page corresponding to what you’ve set in File > Page Setup. Some writers like working like this, because it gives a feeling of progress each time you get to the end of a virtual page and start another one.
To enable this on Mac, choose View > Text Editing > Show Page View (or Hide Page View to turn it off). On Windows, choose View > Text Editing > Page View, and choose it again to turn it off.
Scrivener offers some options for page view in its Appearance settings. On Mac, you can tell Scrivener to use page view by default in new projects if you always want to work that way. You can have the app show facing pages in new projects, what is sometimes called two-up. (Choose View > Text Editing > Two Pages Across to change that in your existing project.) On Mac and Windows, you can choose to center pages, show margin guides, change the spacing between pages, and change the background color for page view.
The tweaks covered in this article are small, but they can help you personalize your Scrivener environment, and, in some cases, make it easy to read or navigate through your project.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.