spaceemotion On my end, I tend to write and edit on the most micro level, scenes. I don't have the feeling I've "finished" that part until I collapse that part, I used dabble in the past for first drafts for that reason.

Actually the navigation is perfect there but it lacks a LOT that novelcrafter has. Design, quick response and simplicity is what made stick to that software for so long, you can access every part of your book or books in a series by a left navigation panel, and open and collapse as needed.

I think it can be implemented here, for quick access to all the content in the book. Maybe as a tab beside the Codex one, that would be terrific for navigating fast instead of going back to the Plan tab.

Edit: I know I deviated a lot from the answer, and this would be a great new feature to novelcrafter, so I'll answer the full topic in another comment with an example video.

spaceemotion https://drive.google.com/file/d/12UyyBQn6csiXyKfKCvcpdt_GwgFxEtBe/view?usp=drive_link

As you can see on the video, if you try to navigate on a lot of scene cards when editing, would get you lost. Imagine that with a lot of tags, and yes, we could just change the view to small, but when you are editing, you take a look at the summaries (not that you forget what you wrote there only by the chapter title but... you get my point).

Now imagine you have long scenes, as in my case, I write epic fantasy, and they are really long scenes, the summaries are quite long, I tend the AI to do them for me in this case, than correct if needed, and they make quite big boxes there.

In the Outline view becomes quite challenging to navigate that way.

Brave Frog Thanks for the reply! the video doesn't seem to be public though

spaceemotion In general, both when I'm writing and editing, I tend to want to collapse the part I'm done with so the open part is always the "where I'm at.

Similar to being able to collapse an Act (a feature I love), being able to collapse the scenes into a chapter so I only have the chapter banners available to see (and open) will let all the scenes be tucked away.

My chapters tend to be 2-3 scenes, but are sometimes up to 5 scenes, and in the most useful views for me, it becomes unruly having to scroll through all that to get to the current place I'm working at.

In your example, if you were able to collapse chapter 2 as well, then the next row of chapters would be available more easily. (As in the view you're in, I tend to get 3 chapters across for each row.)

For the Outline view, I would be able to have them all closed except where I'm working so I would find it and work on it easier.

spaceemotion I write and edit at scene level. My chapters have 3-6 scenes each. Love the act collapsing, and seriously thought about making each chapter an act just to get to this level of visibility. I edit by adding/changing things sprinkled throughout the book. If I could fix a chapter and then collapse, it would make write/plan toggling so much easier/faster. Now I have to write down where I left off on a sheet of paper over and over as I toggle write/plan during editing. Now I am using fake codex and color codes to try to 'label' my issues and use search in plan mode to get the rest of the scenes to fade out. But searching SEX pops up every variation of those letters... not perfect. Taking this down to chapter collapse allows me to drill down more - almost to the point that not being able to toggle seamlessly between write and plan modes so I don't scroll through 100K words isn't that big of an issue anymore.

spaceemotion Oh, sorry! It's fixed now, but I think you got my point with the explanation.

spaceemotion I may be misunderstanding the question and your example image, but what I desperately want is to be able to collapse the visible bits down to just the Chapter and/or Scene Headings. Yes, that means I have to know what is in that scene without the long description, but when I want to do big reorganizations or move scenes or chapters around, it's unhelpful to have to scroll and scroll and scroll while dragging a scene from the end of chapter 30 up to the prologue.

However, the better use case is that when I'm just doing a lot of scene idea generation, I'll create a scene idea and worry about where it fits later. I like doing a lot of these potential story beats or scenes and just make a ton of them and then place them later when I think of where they can best fit. I'll create these (generally) at the bottom or end of all my current chapters and then move them.

My attached example is how I feel this option would look. Chapter # and Chapter name (if named) and each Scene # and Scene name (if named), otherwise, just "Chapter 1" visible.

Citrine Opossum Okay, so just a more compacted view of the scenes then? basically hiding all the stuff and just "show the chapter" - but not have the chapter itself be all small?