How to use Shift + number on azerty keyboard?

• Apr 22, 2016 - 19:59

Thomas has posted a link to a "How to enter chords" tutorial.
This is great: I didn't know alt + number could be used to enter a note above and shift + number a note below.
The problem is, I can't get shift + number working on my azerty keyboard (alt + number is no problem).
Is this possible or not?


Comments

Reading previous post on azerty problem, I've tried this:
remove shortcut Shift+4 from note duration 8th
and try to add shortcut Shift+4 to Enter a fourth below
But it doesn't work: typing Shift+4 register only "4" and not Shift+4 in the shorcut tool.
Strange: should it mean that it is impossible to enter the shorcut Shift+4 while it is part of the default settings?

Preusmably that is an older tutorial - probably from 1.x? The Shift+number shortcuts were disabled by default for 2.0 because they cause conflcits on certain keyboards - perhaps including yours? Basically, if your keybaord requires Shift just to get to the numbers, then Shift+4 is the same as just "4", which was causing "4" (the standard shortcut to set duration) not to work. You could try defining some *other* shortcut.

On a Belgium AZERTY keyboard, the key ["3] of the main keyboard (just above z-e, between 2 and 4) produces the character " (double quote) without shift and 3 with shift.
In the shortcut definition tool,
pressing ["3] (without shift) registers " (double quote)
pressing [Shift]+["3] registers 3 (not Shift+3)

Until then that seems logical.

But:

[1] To get a semi-quaver you don't need to produce the character 3, the key ["3] without shift is enough.
This is very good (and I didn't read that at first in the handbook, the first weeks I was using MuseScore I always did Shift+["3], I discovered by accident that ["3] without shift was working also.)
[1a] ==> but how can it work as the character ["] is not associated with semi-quaver in the shortcuts?
[1b] ==> by the way if I associate the character " with another action, Musescore doesn't care, it continues to interpretate " as 3

[2]
On this same AZERTY keyboard, the key [A] produces the character a without shift and A with shift.
In the shortcut definition tool,
pressing [A] (without shift) registers A (not lowercase a)
pressing [Shift]+[A] registers Shift+A

==> this is excellent, and if Musescore would handle the ["3] key the same way:

pressing ["3] (without shift) would register 3
pressing [Shift]+["3] would register Shift+3

That would make current behavior of Musescore [1a] and [1b] not curiosities but logical consequences, and would allow azerty keyboards to use shift+number shortcuts

What do you think?

In reply to by frfancha

I don't understand enough about how Qt (the library we use to do most system-dependent stuff) handles keybaord shortcuts. All I know is when this wass investigated in the past, no one was able to find a way to make it work. That was several revisions of Qt ago, though, maybe things are better somehow now. Definitely worth looking into. We're also considering having "shortcut sets" that could be saved and loaded so that different systems could use different sets of shortcuts - ones optimzied for different keyboard layouts, one optimzied for for playback than for editing, one optimized for blind users, etc.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

'how Qt (the library we use to do most system-dependent stuff) handles keybaord shortcuts'

Do I understand correctly that MuseScore relies on QT managing the shortcut and not reading "physical keys" from the keyboard (as a game would do)?

In that case I can try different things with the current version of QT on my AZERTY keyboard and let you know if I find a "working" way.

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