Hide a file from Scrivenings view

Something I wish I could do – at least 5 times a week – but don’t think I can. Yet.

It’s the great feature (for me) of the nice, full-of-promise Movie Draft SE (which seemed to stall in development, alas): HIDE SCENE.

In Movie Draft, you’d right-click on the relevant scene summary card in Movie Draft’s equivalent of the Binder, and select “Hide Scene”. The “index card” takes on a crumpled-up appearance and disappears from the run of text in the main pane. But it’s still clearly visible in the “binder” in its crumpled state.

This is really useful. I can try three or four different versions of a scene or sequence and see how they compare. Can I do this in Scrivener? Yes. But the ones that I’m putting in the boneyard remain visible in the “binder”, and I can switch them in and out with a single right-click.

I know someone was asking about hiding scenes from Compile but frankly I’m much more interested in what I’m composing now rather than what it’s going to be like One Day when compile time comes.

Actually now I come to think of it, “Include in Compile”, on the few occasions I’ve used it, has been more of a snare and a delusion, provoking feeble shouts of “Why the f-- Oh. Damn. My fault.”

Deal with it, blast you, or I’l have you all horsewhipped on the steps of your club. (Silly threat. All you’d need to do was join a club with no steps. Or indeed join no club at all. But I digress.)

The “Include in Compile” feature is in fact probably the best way to go about this. I’m not sure what snarls you ran into with it before, but disabling that feature on an item is precisely the way to “hide” something from compile. As you note though, that does nothing for your Binder. We’re looking into visual methods to indicate that status within the Binder view, there might be something along the lines of an overstrike in a future version of Scrivener, but I can’t really promise anything along those lines. There will be nothing like hiding though, the Binder is meant to be a 100% accurate list of every resource in the project at all times.

Meanwhile though, there is a way to hide things from working views: hold down the Option key when you click on a group, and all items within that group that do not have an “Include in Compile” checkbox will be left out of the Corkboard, Scrivenings session or or Outliner.

One snare of Include in Compile is precisely that an unchecked item is not visually identified, in the binder, as being excluded from compile. When unchecking an item you’re doing something very significant to it which won’t become clear until often quite a long way down the road; yes, you can change its icon or status or whatever but that makes it a multi-step process that you have to remember to go through. What I’m looking for is a quick way to say “Let’s see how it reads with v5 instead, but not forgetting that the other versions are still there” and doing it automagically with one click.

Exactly so.

My – or rather Movie Draft’s – method of marking the relevant files in the Binder (the “crumpled card” cue) increases the accuracy of the Binder’s resource listing; it gives one an extra piece of information (“You won’t see me when you look at the Draft in Scrivenings view”).

A corkaround – I mean “workaround” but isn’t “corkaround” a nice word? I am going to start using it – but it does mean that instead of a right-click on the Binder (as in Moviedraft) I must

• Get the info pane up
• Uncheck Include in Compile
• Select the relevant file in Binder
• Change the icon/status for that file (so I can identify it)
• Rinse
• Repeat
• Unravel it all when I’ve done

It’ a bit more cumbersome, and a bit less automatic, than a right-click on the filename in the Binder. Perhaps it’s just me.

Could you not use a label tag as “hidden” and give the label a colour and show it in the binder? If project search allows “Not X”, you could then use a collection based on 'Not “hidden” ’ to view your text and change the view merely by changing the labels on the documents. Otherwise you’d need two labels, “hidden” and “visible” or whatever.

Mr X

Edited once to remove idiocy!

Corkaround works for me. It’s a good trick, but it does have its limits, particularly where you want to see a full multi-level view of the Draft outline that excludes anything not meant to be printed. You can use the outliner, but as with all “multiple selection” views, it will be flat and immutable as a list.

Quite right, but we feel the solution should be to mark that item somehow rather than hide it. I suppose the best way to explain why is to point to something just mentioned, how multiple selections behave and why they do. The ability to drag things around inside of a multiple selection, or into them, is disabled because it cannot be relied upon that there will be a logical place to put the dropped item. What is between “A” and “B” that we cannot see at the moment? It might even be six levels of hierarchy between the two. Does the dropped item get placed next to “A”, six levels deep, or right above “B” back at the top level?

It would follow that a similar way of viewing the Binder, with elements not being displayed between other elements, would have to be a “read only” list. As with the various uses of a multiple selection, it would have its uses, but it wouldn’t give you much you don’t already have in the main editor split (where incidentally in Outliner mode you can add the “Include” column and have immediate access to that information, including bulk operations where you select several and Option-click on any one of the checkboxes in the selection).

Secondly there is the reason for why Multiple Selections are flat lists. It’s one thing to flag some discarded scenes inside of a folder as not part of the Draft, but what if the folder is excluded? Do we draw the one item that is visible to compile, indented for no reason (or confusingly, as a child of the item above it by happenstance)?

You could achieve a very similar list in the sidebar, using Project Search to only find Included items in the Draft, and then search for “*”. There is your filtered flat sidebar view, save it as a collection and you’re good to go—if that approach is something that works for your outline of course.

All around it is less complicated, and potentially far less confusing, to draw these excluded items in a different visual fashion so that their status can be seen, without disturbing the visual continuity of the outline or raising impossible to solve situations over how item movement should be handled.

Hmm, I am not sure if that approach entirely responds to what you are looking for, since it seems in part not only the visual treatment, but how easy it is to toggle this condition (crumpling vs. clicking a bunch of buttons). Toggling the state of a document will be easier in the new design as well, hopefully that along with no longer needing to set a second meta-data value to create a visual effect, may bring things a little closer though.

Ah, yes. The FoldingText Pit of Doom there. (And the opposite, too: in FoldingText if you filter on a tag then copy the filtered results, all the ones that weren’t filtered out annoyingly reappear on the pasteboard. Bastard things.)

Metadata! Aha! There goes another afternoon, futzing about when I should be working.

(I just wrote a Programmers’ Chorus for something I’m working on which has an ostinato of Code Apes doing a merry little dance and chanting “If, Then, Else, FECK! If, Then, Else, FECK!” etc. It’s quite sweet really.)

EDIT: Fecked up the fecking BBCode. Why can’t they use MultiMarkdown? We live in MODERN TIMES now, feck it.

Now then, young Michael, calm down! Temper tantrums’ll get y’ nowhere.
Just take a deep breath and count to 887,348,609,000,000,000, then breath out slowly, to the count of ten. Repeat as required.You’ll probably see you probs in a whole new light.
Good luck,
vic

Wouldn’t snapshots do exactly what you want, for comparing different versions of the same scene without seeing multiple versions in the binder? You take a snapshot, change it, then open the snapshots pane in the (very wide) inspector, click on the snapshot you want to compare the current version to, and you’re golden. You can use the compare functionallity if the differences are small and scattered, or just visually scan them. You can also drag a snapshot into a split editor’s header for a read-only view of it in a more conventional view. You can swap them out by restoring an older version (I believe Scrivener gives you the option to take a snapshot of the current version before doing the swap).

The icon even becomes dogeared to let you know there are more than one version to consider.

Can you expand on this: I’m trying to select two out-of-sequence items in the binder to show in scrivenings view, but want to only show items that are included in compile (not all of a folder’s enclosing items).

I may be in trouble because the items I want are at different levels in the hierarchy. I try holding the Option key and it opens the next item in the other editor, rather than adding it to scrivenings.

Can I show out of sequence items from various levels together in scrivenings?

Command-click is the Mac standard for adding disparate things to a selection, and this holds true for selecting disparate items in the binder. Whether you can usefully combine that with the Option-key to get the additional effect your looking for, I don’t know (and can’t test from my current location*).

gr

• Woke up this morning in cyberspace and haven’t yet figured how to get back out. Hitting the Space Bar might be the answer, but it doesn’t open until 5pm.

There used to be an Option-click command in v2 that would load a container as a multiple selection in the editor, excluding from that selection any items that were excluded from compile. This shortcut was removed to make way for the current v3 behaviour where Option-clicking targets the opposing split.

The capability however still exists: Navigate ▸ Open ▸ with Compilable Subdocuments, and that is also available from the contextual menu when right-clicking on a container. If one wishes to use that frequently, adding a keyboard shortcut would be the way to do so.

Perfect! Thank you. I was pretty sure there was a way to do that. Whew.