Issues with control-click

• Jul 18, 2020 - 00:53

If I have a number of things selected (whether by control-click or Select Similar) and want to edit the selection (usually to unselect items, occasionally to add something) sometimes and unpredictably control-click does not make the desired change. It may fail to unselect an item or to select another item. Rarely, after trying repeatedly, it eventually works for no apparent reason. More often, after clicking on some other item and coming back, then it works. Sometimes clicking on another nearby item unselects the original one instead. It seems to be random and with no discernible pattern and I cannot predictably duplicate it. The one common denominator seems to be having quite a number of items concurrently selected.


Comments

I just found what appears to be a related issue. If I repeatedly control-click on a single note or chord, such as to cycle through selection of the voices in it, after a few clicks the cycling stops and nothing changes until I click away from the note. In testing this It seemed that the more times I did it on the same note the more clicks it took until it stopped, until it "broke through" and ceased stopping, so I could apparently control-click forever.

What version of MuseScore, and can you attach a sample score and precise steps to reproduce this?

Note that if there are overlapping elements, Ctrl+click selects the one underneath the current one, in addition to unselecting the current.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Version 3.4.2.9788

As I stated earlier, this issue seems random and I cannot reproduce it with certainty so cannot provide a score where it is guaranteed to happen. I'm hoping enough others say "Me too" that eventually the cause will be identified. I have however attached a score where I have observed the control-click stoppage happen. Try control-clicking on any of the notes in the 2nd staff where both voices share the same pitch (stem up and down). It's not limited to that, but that's where I've observed it most because that's where I'm trying to select only one or the other voice. Keep clicking until it stops changing the selection and see how long it takes.

Attachment Size
237_In_the_Cross_of_Christ_I_Glory.mscz 17.27 KB

In reply to by Gerald Reynolds

Well, that's specifically where what I described kicks in. If you have two overlapping notes (or overlapping anything) the first ctrl+click in that location selects the "top" one. The next ctrl+click in that same location deselect the top note and selects what is underneath. If there is something else under there, another ctrl+click deselect the current notes and select the next one down, etc. Once you reach the bottom of the stack, the next ctrl+click deselects it.

So for instance, measure 5, second staff, first note. First Cltr+click selects the voice 1 note (blue), second deselects it and selects the voice 2 note (green), third deselects it and leaves nothing. Another Ctrl+click starts that cycle again.

In cases where there are no overlapping elements, this is just an on-off toggle like you expect of ctrl+click, but that's not a special case, it's just the natural result of that same process.

Perhaps when you are ctrl+clicking, sometimes you are hitting the notehead, other times the stem. But if I zoom in enough to guarantee this doesn't happen, I can Ctrl+click that note all day long and it always cycles through those three states, completely reliably. I just tried it literally 100 times and it went through exact that cycle every time.

Another possible issue is that maybe you are clicking too fast and it registers as a double-click, which puts you into Edit mode.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The last possibility may be it. In testing I was clicking at about 2 clicks per second. I found just now that there was a very fine line at that speed between being able to click forever and getting stopped. I must be right on that line. I'm definitely not clicking away from the notehead. I even zoomed in as you did to be sure, and it still stopped at just over two clicks per second. When it doesn't stop, the voice selection indicator in the toolbar changes. When it does stop, that does not change; rather, the entire toolbar goes gray. I guess that means I've entered Edit mode. I'll have to evaluate the behavior of what I reported first with that in mind. But it seemed more complex than that. For example, in pieces like this one I had just changed most of the Voice 2 notes to Voice 1 and had all the rests in the staff selected, for both voices, using Select Similar. I was trying to unselect the Voice 1 rests so I could mass delete only the Voice 2 rests. Control-click would not unselect the Voice 1 rest until I control-clicked on the Voice 2 rest below it; then it unselected the Voice 1 rest above instead. But behavior varied. Sometimes it just worked; sometimes it worked like that; and sometimes it worked in some other way, control-clicking in some other place a few notes away but didn't work on the rest directly below.

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