Keyboard sequence and highlighting of current position

• Jan 11, 2012 - 16:28

As a new user I have collected a few notes on minor things in the interface that occasionally surprise me. These are not well formed problem reports with clearly defined observed and expected behaviour. But I offer them in case they are known issues or I am ignorant about a feature. Thanks for your patience with my meandering.

version 1.1 revision 4611, Windows 7

1. double click on a note (by accident), note appears selected, ctrl-l does not bring up libretto
press esc once, single click, ctrl-l works fine. There is something ofdd about the double-click on a note.

2. when typing into a libretto, the space bar and hyphen are a great idea and they work well. Sometimes I go to delete a piece of text and I cannot select it. It also happened with a phrase mark - perhaps a repainting issue, is deleted but not showing as such. Sometimes repaired by pressing N

3. in review mode (not Note and not Libretto mode), if I change the size of a note, say from crotchet to quaver, the libretto is deleted. This is sometimes useful and sometimes a nuisance. Prefer that it not delete.

4. I note a significant slow down for vocal recitative scores longer than 5 pages (I am setting the words of a new translation of the psalms to test its rhythm - psalm 18 is very long, 270 bars). I wondered if it might be a memory leak. Shutting down and restarting did not improve performance. Perhaps the space management that happens when typing libretto is producing a slowdown. Two suggestions, when the user is typing, postpone the re-formatting until the user exits libretto mode; when there is text in the next slot, rather than positioning the cursor after the text, pre-select the text so that a keystroke (except space, hyphen or arrow key) deletes it.

5. mode and selected note are sometimes surprising. I am working at the end of a score, exit from libretto, hit the wrong key and I changed a note 8 pages away. Sometimes I have noted that a note seems to be selected (colour blue) but it is not really selected. I am not sure what to specify as desired behaviour here. Will think about it. If note is coloured I would expect it is also selected.

6. Sometimes when entering rests I am not sure what note is going to be typed where. If in note mode, and the next rest is already the correct size, I use the right arrow to move next instead of typing 0. The right arrow does not move the selected slot, but it looks like it has. So when I next enter a note, it is entered in the wrong place. It would be intuitive if the right arrow selected as well as coloured the next rest. This would be consitent with the right left arrow when in display/review mode. It appears to me that colouring of the note/rest and the actual 'slot' are not in sync sometimes.


Comments

I think these are good reports despite being not exactly step by step procedures. Some observations:

1. Double clicking a note puts it int Edit Mode - a special mode in which the cursor keys allow you to nudge the physical position of the note? The only way this mode is indicated is via small text label in the lower right corner of the staus bar. Definitely could be clearer, but that's what you're seeing.

6. I agree that sometimes it isn't as clear as it could be what is going on when using the cursor keys in note entry mode. I think there might already be some specific bug reports in the issue tracker regarding this, but if you wanted to put together a particular step by step scenario where the behavior is not as expected, I suspect that would make it much more likely to he fixed, and here at least the behavior does generally seem to be repeatable.

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