So, I finally finished the first draft of my novella using Author Intrusion. It wasn't the easiest thing to do. The novella was hard to start with, too much plot planning, but there were definitely aspects about Author Intrusion that slowed me down. They are all fixable things, of course, but I figured I'd write them up (and I haven't posted in a while).

Navigation

The biggest problem was navigation. When I normally write novels, I have one file per chapter. It makes it easier to jump between chapters and focus on a single scene instead of having 30k words worth of stuff above me. At the moment, the problem can't handle that so I'm back to a single file for the entire novella. It was distracting, to say the least.

I also didn't have a way to easily move between chapters besides scrolling. After a few weeks of scrolling up and down, I realize what I really need is ReSharper's equivalent of Control-T ("Find Type" which would become "Table of Contents"). I also need to have bookmarks (Set Bookmark, Next Bookmark, Previous Bookmark).

Of course... I really should get the pluggable command system working first.

Updating Errors

At the moment, when I added a new word to the spell-checking, it doesn't remove it from the document. So, the new paragraphs show the word spelled correctly but the old ones still mark it as an error. What I really need to do is rescan the document after adding words to the dictionary.

Performance

The other biggest annoyance didn't start to show until I started editing. Appending new paragraphs was fast and wonderful. It kept up with my typing speed while writing. Adding paragraphs in the middle? No. 50k words below an inserted text is painful to use; I suspect it comes from trying to update too many things (and I seem to recall I solved it already). Likewise, deleting lines are very slow.

Finally, startup performance suffers greatly with larger documents. I just need to move loading into the background and figure out how to load it safely.

Happily

Beyond those (relatively) minor things, it worked. It's rough, occasionally painful, but it was enough to write something. I figured I'll make some changes next week to help with the worse of the pain (I'm working on a few chapters of SAL) before I go back to editing.`