Here’s a tutorial on finding your way around Scrivener’s Binder. This training is provided by Literature & Latte, creators of Scrivener.
Transcript: In the other video about the binder, we saw that clicking on a document in the binder opens it in the editor, but there are other ways of navigating around your Scrivener project so the selection in the binder doesn’t always match what is displayed in the editor.
To demonstrate I’ll click through the first few chapters of our example project here, then press the back button provided in the editor’s header bar. I’m now viewing chapter two in the editor while our selection in the binder doesn’t seem to have changed chapter four is still highlighted over here in the binder. However you’ll notice that a secondary selection bar has appeared highlighting the chapter we’re looking at in the editor, this allows you to return to your previous place by clicking the selection in the binder that means the binder doesn’t jump around when you’re navigating using the editor, but you can still see where the current document is.
If you want the binder to select the document you’re currently looking at in the editor, hit command option R which is the keyboard shortcut for reveal in binder from the navigate menu. Scrivener allows you to split the editor so you can view two files side-by-side. It’s possible to navigate between documents in either editor by using the binder, but right now only the editor which is InFocus will be affected by what you click on in the binder.,
You can tell the editor is InFocus, when the header bar appears blue and that can be changed simply by clicking in the other editor. As you can see when I click on an item in the binder, it’s opening in the editor with the blue header. By holding down the option key when you click items in the binder, it’s possible to do the opposite preserving the document in the editor with the blue header and opening documents in the editor which isn’t InFocus.
Alternatively, by going to navigate binder selection effects, you can tell Scrivener to open documents in the other editor. You can even prevent an editor from being affected by the binder at all by control-clicking on the header bar and choosing ‘lock in place,’ or using the keyboard shortcut command option L to lock the editor which is currently InFocus.
The header bar then turns this orangey pink color and now any selection you make in the binder will automatically affect the other editor which you’ll notice it still has a blue header. This doesn’t mean you can’t make edits in the editor you’ve locked in place though, you can click in here and type as normal.
The editor focus is now shown by the thick line on the bottom border of the header bar. Watch how this changes as I click between each editor. When you aren’t working with a locked editor, the InFocus editor will have both the blue header and the thick divider. So, as you can see the binder and editor can interact in a variety of ways.
Thanks for watching and happy writing.