It’s safe. As it is working with other document types like Pages and Numbers – as long as you don’t mess around with the file names.
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Further to @chrillek ’s comment, use DEVONthink to navigate and open from there. Do not use Finder or the app’s file navigation to find the file inside the DEVONthink database.
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Oh, I don’t like the editor. I sometimes do it of course but I don’t enjoy writing on it.
Yep, this is the reason.
The beauty of DEVONthink is you can use pretty much what you want and still keep the files inside the DEVONthink database.
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Thanks friend, I like your idea. I think I’ll stick with iA Writer, also thanks for providing the extra configuration steps.
Definitely, thank you.
As with DT, many Scrivener users find that they like it so much that they want to use it for everything.
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I also sometimes prefer using an external editor,
storing the work-in-progress file in Devonthink; in native format (not export)
This works fine with Apple Pages
Other note apps (Notability, Notes) want to store the note file in their own internal database and not share a separate/individual file
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I have Devonthink set up to open a file in DT on double-click. That way if I want to use an external editor I can click the “open externally” toolbar button if I want to use an external editor.
One advantage of DT’s internal editor for Markdown or RTF is the editor can display inspectors. That gives the context of links, mentions, see-also, and annotation files.
If you want to lock a file, do that with Devonthink’s lock function. If you lock a file in an application, it’s probably going to be a Finder lock which will interfere with DT’s internal maintenance.
I would never do such a thing of course, but I know a guy who did… Yeah, that’s it, some other guy…
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Wow, I’ll try to find some time to download it and test it. Sounds interesting.
At the moment I went with IA Writer which creates a folder on iCloud and is being indexed by DT. I think I can make some rules or something to later move files to another place of the Database.
Why? What is wrong with having the files inside a database and opening IA Writer by double clicking on them?
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Basically it’s because iA Writer can’t see any relatively linked (or wiki linked) local image files, so you have to use indexed folders, not imported ones if you want to see the images in that document while you work on it. Imported md files are stored in different places in the file system than images, which confuses iA writer (or any other external editor).
It’s more complicated than that, because iA Writer also does silly things like expecting the image folder to be in its Location bar. There are workarounds, but they also only work with indexed files.
At least that’s my experience: if anyone has a better way of making this all work, please let me know…
OMG – long time Scrivener user/fan (as in what would I do without it) – how did I miss this?! Drag and drop from Scrivener to DT? Will wonders never cease. Thanks for the mental upgrade.
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@DCBerk Haha … You’re welcome. You’re probably one of those users who would only use Scrivener if Scrivener could manage more than 3,000 documents per project.
Hi Frank – Current project probably has more than 3000, but I’m too busy to stop and count. 
And it would be more if I didn’t keep most research in DT. But definitely would use Scrivener for smaller things – its a wonderful app – use it every day and always recommend it to others who write.
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Frank:
A PS
Looks like 3000 files doesn’t even approach Scrivener capacity; the limit is your computer memory/storage, not the app.
This from a query sent to Literature and Latte:
"The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. is estimated to have approximately 20TB of data, if you were to digitise all of the books. This means you could fit most of nearly everything that has ever been written in a Scrivener project. At 20 million volumes in the LoC, but a 2+ billion capacity in OS X, that even means you could split up all of those books into appropriate Scrivener sized chunks.
It should be mentioned in passing that if you actually did have a project that big, your office would sound like a 747 with all of those hard drives and servers."
I expect that the practical limit is quite a bit smaller. To my knowledge, no one has ever (successfully) assembled a 20 TB Scrivenings session. 
@DCBerk My limit is the number of documents I can search at a reasonable speed. Given the size of my documents and my mix (RTF, PDF, WEB), that’s pretty much 3000. I abused the app for years and came up with all sorts of tricks to increase the limit. Until it was no longer possible.
That’s ok. Scrivener was never built to be a “real” database. But of course I wouldn’t mind if version 4 was more powerful 
Scrivener does that for you. Just type * in the search field 
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