Losing focus off the notes

• Aug 12, 2017 - 16:48

I'm a keyboard stakhanovist, I now ;-)
When I work on my scores, if i type two times on the Esc key, I lose the focus off the score, i.e. nothing at all is selected.
It's annoying because then, I need to leave the keyboard, take the mouse, select carefully a notehead or a measure, leave the mouse and come back to the keyboard.
Ergonomically, it's not the top.

In a similar way, selecting the stem of a note is not selecting the note itself. I can't figure out how to go from the note itself to the stem and back. It's peculiarly annoying on tablet when you have "big" (i.e. normal!) fingers


Comments

It's deliberately that Esc deselects things - a pretty important feature, actually, because often the first step in doing some operation is to make sure nothing is already selected.

I guess you would want a way to initiate a selection without using the mouse? Try Ctrl+Home, which selects the first element of your score. I could imagine some day implementing a "restore most selection command".

As for selecting the stem, what are you trying to do exactly? if you're saying you are trying to select the note and don't want the stem selected at all, I sympathize. I've implemented an experimental facility to make it easier to select notes, not sure if/when that would become part of MuseScore officially.

Meanwhile, if you do find yourself with a stem selected, just hit a cursor key to select the note instead.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi, Marc,

Thank you for the reply, I have to admit that I didn't know the keyboard shortcuts you mentioned. Effectively, it solves partiallly my concern. You're right, I too vote for the "restore most selection command", because it's not very ergonomic if your score is 546 bars long...

For the problem of the stem, I think it'll be ok with cursor keys, but I agree with you, I don't want the stem selected at all. It's very unprobable that I have to select the stem itself when I click around a not. For that too, I vote for your experimental facility!

And now, last but not least, do you have a magic recipe to jump between parts from the keyboard (i.e around the same bar, navigate between violin, trumpet, right- or left-hand of the piano, etc.) ?

Thank you again,

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Which reminds me that I always wanted to ask for the "inner logic" behind MS's key bindings. My other editting program (Emacs) comes with lots of keybindings but they tend to follow a strict system. With MS I often feel like bindings are kind of arbitrary. Why, for example, isn't Alt-left/Alt-right used for measure navigation. Wouldn't it be much simpler to remember 'Alt-' moves semantically through the score?

Is there any documentation of the grand scheme of MS user interface design (if there is there any)?

In reply to by rmattes

Not that I know of. Ctrl+left/right is the standard shortcut in most OS's for "word left/right" about made sense to use here. Up/down work differently because they are used to Change pitch. Then we also have to consider working with multiple OS's and multiple keyboard layouts. So it is what it is. But of course you can customize this however you like.

In reply to by bersyl91

Pages other than the forums have the option of adding version numbers to the page. I don't know if this is something that could be added to forum posts or not. If it is possible, it would be a big project to add them to every page but people could add a version to the pages as they run across them to help others find posts relevant to their version of MuseScore.

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