Scrivener is fantastic. The best research tool I’ve ever used. I do have two requests that I hope you can implement; one is a minor change that won’t take much effort I think and the other is a change. First:
I find the search option a little irritating. If I want to search for, say, assistant, Scrivener starts searching as soon as I type ‘a.’ I’d much prefer it if I had the option of typing the full word and then pressing enter to search. I have very large Scrivener documents and once I’ve started typing a letter it can sometimes freeze for ten seconds or longer while it searches. If you had an option of typing a full word, this would be much better.
The second area is the Snapshot section. For the Windows version, it’s insufficient. Everything else is brilliant, but the snapshot needs some work. The text in the box in the bottom right corner of a snapshot is far too small and there’s no way of making it bigger. If some work on this could make it bigger would be greatly appreciated. In addition, there’s no option of seeing improvements to drafts, unlike the Mac version. Is it possible some work could be done on this as well please?
Thanks! Glad to hear Scrivener is working out well for your research.
You’ll find an answer to your first query in this thread, scroll down to the paragraph starting with, “The idea behind the popularity of this model…”.
The main point being made there is that the best answer is to fix the root of the problem (the freezing) rather than retrograding search behaviour to older models.
Next:
As noted in the wish list readme, everything in the Mac version is already on the to-do list; no need to post requests as such.
I’m not sure what the best solution is for the font size. It’s showing at 100% or what is literally accurate. Most Windows users are accustomed to 135% scaled fonts from Word and such. Well one approach (the one I use myself on a Mac, where 100% is normal) would be to settle on 100% in your main editor and then boost the font you use for writing overall to something comfortable like 14 or 16pt. Then it will look the same in snapshots. It might also not be something worth troubling over, since one of the scheduled improvements is to make it possible to load a snapshot into a main editor split, where it would then take on that splits magnification setting.
I looked at the link where it was explained that search-as-you-type is more efficient, and for 90% of projects that’s certainly true. But for very large projects it would be really helpful to have an option to Press enter to search or a customisable delay that Scrivener waits after typing stops before searching.
What happens with very large projects, is that I lose productivity because I go to search, forgetting that I’m in a big project, and just type the first letter or two of my search string and pause for a moment while thinking exactly what I want to search for. And Scrivener freezes for 10’s of seconds before showing me every document in my project with, eg, the letter ‘a’ highlighted.
As the OP of ‘this thread’, https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/wish-candidates-project-search/34832/1,
I agree with you, particularly when the search is for a phrase. I may be wrong but it seems to me that those modern search tools that begin searching early, at least restart the search (admittedly, repeatedly) as I type the search string.
Besides, I do have modern ‘local’ apps that do wait for ENTER.
Again though, the real problem here is the search engine freezing in larger projects, not the concept of real-time search results. If the results do not freeze, then there is no problem searching in a large project. Changing how the entire engine works to get around freezing, when we can just fix the freezing in the first place would be a bandaid solution.