Showing Note/Chord properties in Inspector for range selection

• Oct 31, 2014 - 16:42

Marvelous as the Inspector is in most ways, there is one usability issue that keeps cropping up: the fact that when you select a range of notes (as opposed to multi-select of individual notes), the Inspector sees this as a non-homogenous selection and thus gives you only the generic Element properties. So to see Note or Chord properties, you need to then right click a note and choose Select / All Similar Elements in Range Selection. This is non-obvious, and it feels like an unnecessary extra step given that when we select a range, it is most likely notes / chord that we are interested in.

What if we modified the Inspector to still show Note & Chord properties for range selections (and of course, apply them only to notes and chords within the selection)? It seems this would be a very useful usability optimization.

If for some reason this is felt to be not "clean", what about adding a "Select notes only" button to the Inspector that displays when a range is selected, the effect of which would be the same as if you right clicked a note and chose Select / All Similar Elements in Range Selection?


Comments

Usually if I select a range of notes I would either only want to change the properties of the notes or I would want to change the properties of the notes and rests in the selection (typically to "Small").

I would suggest three Radio Buttons with the default being that notes and rests are selected, second button being Notes Only and third being Apply to All Elements in Selection (you might, for instance want to change the colour of everything).

In reply to by underquark

That's getting more complicated :-). I agree sometimes you want rests included too - to be able to set them "small" along with the notes being the msot obvious choice.

I think my own preference would be no extra buttons, but show both the Note, Chord, and Rest properties any time a range is selected. The Element properties would continue to apply to everything, but the Note and Chord properties would apply only to the notes, the rest properties only to the rests. If you want to apply an Element property (like color) to only the notes or only rests, you could still use the Select / All Similar Elements in Range Selection method.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I would agree to have no extra buttons, as explained in your last post.

I just stumbled about this problem again yesterday, and I agree that being able to fully use the inspector for ranges of notes would be very handy and, in my opinion, what would be expectable.

In the spirit of keeping things simple my response to the proposal for range selections to show note/chord properties alway is ... ... ...

YES

:-) :-) :-)

Turns out this is more of a mess than I hoped. I actually something implemented that works very well for simple range selections - ones containing notes and rests only - but it behaves badly with different types of elements included in the selection. Anyone interested in building it and playing with it further, feel free to check out my branch https://github.com/MarcSabatella/MuseScore/tree/inspector-range. But at this point, I know new features are being viewed very skeptically, and while I hoped this would be simple enough to slip by, I now realize it isn't.

The approach of adding a button to select notes only (or rests only) is probably still viable, btw. It wouldn't do anything different from the current right click / select / all simialr elements in range selection, but would be more discoverable. That would require more fiddling with UI stuff than I wanted to deal with, though.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

What about if the beginning and the end of the selection are of the same type, then by default select all elements of that type? I haven't thought through all the use cases, it just seems to feel right that if I click on a note, and shift-click on another note, I want to select notes :-)

In reply to by carneyweb

Not necessarily. You might really have intended to select the full range - for example, as a prelude to copy/paste, deleting, marking invisible, running a plugin, etc. I don't think we should be looking at changing the basic selection behavior; just how Inspector in particular deals with ranges.

That said, there is a related feature I'd like to see at some point: the ability to select "ranges" of other element types in this manner. For example, click one lyric syllable, shift-click another to select all lyric syllables within that range. This wouldn't interfere with anything about how selection works now - that sequence current does nothing useful. But it would simplify the process of selecting a "range" of similar elements. Right now, you can do this by first selecting the range normally, then right clicking a lyric and choosing select / all similar elements in range selection. It's a great and very powerful new feature, to be. But just as with the Inspector and notes, it's non-intuitve, and feels like one more step than should be necessary to achieve the end.

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