Swap notes in measures feature

In my opinion this feature would fit best in a plugin, named SwapMeasures or something like that. I'm going to play around with the new plugin framework. If I'm able to create this plugin I'll let you know.

It would be easier to do if the plugin framework give access to the clipboard I guess.

Yes, probably :) Else a manually copy procedure of each element in the selected measures is required.

I want this plugin/feature very badly.

Can you explain the use case? I'm not quite understanding. You have parts for two different instruments, and you decide later that some passage originally scored for one instrument would be better off played on another, and vice versa?

Since MuseScore doens't provide a way to select discontinugous measures, there really wouldnb't be a way of implementing anything like this that I can see, at least not directly. What is it exactly about simply using a third staff as a scratch staff that causes you to need an alternative? Seems this takes only an extra couple of extra seconds on what seems like not a very common operation?

I didn't mean to make it sound stupid, just trying to figure out how to prioritize it, given that it would mean inventing a whole new interface for mutli-selecting measures. So if there is some other way of accomplish the task that fits better with the current design of MuseScore, that would be much better. So I'm trying to do - and encourage - a little "outside the box" thinking to come up something that would actually be doable that would solve the problem. And part of that means, really doing a good job of defining the problem.

For example, if it were always two adjacent measures - either horizontally or vertically - it would be possible to design a facility that worked on a range selection that consisted of exactly two measures on a single staff or one measure on two consecutive staves. But it sounds like that would not be sufficient. And I'm still trying to understand how either of those uses case would end up being all that common.

The problem isn't the implementation - that's trivial. It's the user interface. Remember, as I said, MuseScore simply does not have any concept of discontiguous range selection. There is no way to select the two measures you want to swap. Select one measure, fine, but the moment you try clicking a second measure, you lose the first selection. There is no way to "mark" two separate measures. Furthermore, plugins cannot, as far as I know, interact with the user sequentially in the way you are assuming - no way for a plugin to stop and waiting for the user to make a new selection and then grab that.

So just figuring out how such a facility could from a user perspective - *that's* probably harder than actually implementing it. Which is, again, why I think it important to understand the real world use case here/ Like, how likely is it that the passages to be exchanged would be more than one measure? What about partial measures? Needing to support passages of arbitrary length could increase the complexity immensely.

Maybe you start by explaining how it works in Finale and Sibelius.

This still doesn't solve the selection problem. Just because you have the contents of a measure saved does not mean you know which measure(s) were originally selected to fill that clipboard. That information would nornally be gone by the time you make the second selection.

Or maybe you mean, you are changing this from a request for an automatic exchange facility to a more manual process that simply replaces the explicit use of a scratch measure with explicit use of this "second clipboard"?

Again, it would be most helpful if you explained how this works in Finale and Sibelius.

I don't wish to implement it indeed. But I don't see why you need to be sarcastic. Were trying to resolve a technical issue, that is all. So I would still like to know more about how it works in Finale and Sibelius.

I think CompleteMusician has actually abandoned the need to have discontinuous range selection. What he needs is the ability to copy to and from 2 separate clipboard storages, preferably with these operations assignable to keyboard shortcuts. Then he can do his 'swap' process with the workflow:

1. Select A
2. Copy to Clipboard 1
3. Select B
4. Copy to Clipboard 2
5. Paste from Clipboard 1
6. Select A again
7. Paste from Clipboard 2

The operations 'cut to clipboard 2', 'copy to clipboard 2' and 'paste from clipboard 2' would need to be available in the shortcuts assignments.

Another option is to restrict this 'swap' process to being available only when the (single) selection range consists of exactly two measures (of the same length), either in the same staff or in adjacent staffs.

A third option I have just thought of would be the ability to swap the current selection with the current clipboard contents. This would make the workflow for an in-music swap:

1. Select A
2. Copy to Clipboard
3. Select B
4. Swap with Clipboard
5. Select A again
6. Paste from Clipboard

I too would benefit from a feature like this.

A possible implementation could be:
1. User selects one or more (whole) source measures in one staff.
2. A menu (either the main menu, or the context menu via a right-click) would have an entry to exchange these selected measures with measures in the same position from another staff. The menu item (perhaps a sub-folder-like item, that itself expands to show other choices) would contain a list of other staves, from which one is chosen as the exchange destination. The menu options could be named something like "Exchange Measures > with part X".

Note that Voice Exchange also appears something like this (under Edit | Voices).

I'm not necessarily interested in selection of partial measures. This could be problematic anyway, e.g. the selected measures across staves did not contain equivalent notes/rhythms etc. So, just an exchange of whole measures would suffice for the vast majority of my needs.

Seems to me that this approach might could be implemented rather easily.

I think Innesw has suggested the most straightforward solution, the "Paste with Swap" (or just "Swap") function. Apparently it is slowly catching on as a useful tool. (see http://peterellisjones.com/post/70523368919/cut-copy-paste-swap )

I envision it working like this...

Select the group of measures A
Cut
Select the first measure of B
right click and select a new option, "Swap"
(now the software does what it would usually do with paste, then replaces the clipboard with the items that were deleted in the process .. grab them from the Undo buffer??)
Select the first measure of A
Paste.

I do like that idea. No major changes needed to underlying architecture of MuseScore, just a single new command that pastes the clipboard to the current position but simulatenously replaces the contents of the clipboard with the original contents of the measures that are being replaced. Chances are pretty good this wouldn't even be terribly hard to implement.

(Posted on IRC)
(jonEnquist) here, working on 19113-swap-notes.
I have an initial solution coded, but have a coding problem, and a stye question.
(coding problem) I would like to extend the current selection to be large enough to accept whatever is in the clipboard.
How could I determine the size (i.e. startStaff, endStaff, startTick, endTick) of the clipboard contents?
(style question) I want to call "normalPaste" but need to know if it was successful. Should I duplicate the code, or move it to a new
funtion bool normalPasteResult(...) and change normalPaste to call the new function?

I don't know an easy way to determine the size of the clipboard. It's basically a XML text representing the selection in more or less the same format as how we would read/write to the file. I guess we could consider adding a field to the clipboard to hold that information - which would be easily known at the point we do the copy into the clipboard - so we don't have to "read" the clipboard to determine its size. Maybe there is another way I am not thinking of, though.

As for getting the result of the paste, I dfinitely vote against any sort of code duplication. If you need the status, why call normalPaste() - why not just call the underlying cmdPaste(), which *does* return status? Or do you mean, you still want to show the dialogs, so that is the code you'd be duplicating? normalPaste() does it's own startCmd()/endCmd(), so I'm not sure it would be a good idea to call it directly from within your code. Hard to say without knowing more about what you are doing.

I discovered the "stafflist" tag at the front of the XML in the clipboard contains attributes "len" and "staves" which supply the information I needed.

I did some experimenting and found the current "undo" "redo" operations do not affect the clipboard contents, so I am not currently concerned about relying on the startcmd() endcmd() in normalPaste(). I also found that while you can select a discontinuous set of notes, do a copy, then select another set of discontinuous notes, or a range, and select "paste," you do not get an error message, but also, nothing seems to happen.

Since the new "swap" operation inherently uses a paste as part of it's function, I'm happiest just calling the existing code at that point. Per the advice of other developers on IRC, I did change "normalPaste" to return the Boolean value I wanted.

I have just achieved my first successful trial of the new code. "It works!"

I expect to send in my pull request by the end of the week.

Hope nobody minds a less inflated title.

See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2535.

Since this is a non-standard sort of operation, what do you think of explicitly naming the command something like "Swap Clipboard and Selection"? Or maybe "Paste and Copy"? "Swap" doesn't really give a clue of what it actually does.

Ah but "Cut and Copy" "Paste and Swap" has almost a beautiful mathematical symmetry that has been lacking since the paradigm was first invented.

But, I see your point. The fact that they are all grouped together as clipboard operations is
only the merest of clues.

I don't want the menus to get much wider than they are, how about "Paste<->Copy" as the title? Otherwise, I would prefer "Swap Clipboard and Selection," if menu width really isn't a great concern.

I made the (1-line) change to the name in my development branch, and I like "Swap Clipboard and Selection."

Hi Marc, I didn't understand why you think a 2nd clipboard would fail to solve the problem.
If I can cut to clipboard-1 from measures a-to-b, then cut something else to clipboard-2 from measures c-to-d, then paste clipboard-1 to mesure c, then finally paste from clipboard-2 to measure a, wouldn't that solve the problem?

Nevertheless, the swap select vs clipboard sounds like a much better idea to me.

This (comment #22) indeeds seems like it would work well. I could paste the clipboard to replace what's selected,
and copy what's selected into the clipboard.
This would solve another issue at the same time :-)
https://musescore.org/en/node/111201

I never said a second clipboard couldn't be useful somehow, just that it would not allow the user to do the specific thing that was being proposed: marking two different selections simultaneously, and then issuing a command to swap them. That quite simply is not possible without first implementing a discontiguous range selection facility - a way to select the two different sections simultaneously.

So the solution actually implemented here is better in my mind because it doesn't require this new discontiguous range selection facility - it's just a single command that works on top of the exisitng selection facility.

Any reason the PR is still under review?

Fixed in branch master, commit 216ea9f1f3

Fix #19113 Added "Swap" to "Copy, Cut, Paste" commands

Fixed in branch master, commit d1605866c8

Merge pull request #2620 from lasconic/fix-19113

Fix #19113 Added "Swap" to "Copy, Cut, Paste" commands

Fixed in branch 2.0.4, commit c0c6003983

Fix #19113 Added "Swap" to "Copy, Cut, Paste" commands

In the meantime how about
1. Insert x measures in front of A (or behind)
2. Cut x measures B (this leaves x empty measures behind)
3. Paste B into the newly inserted measures.
4. Cut x measures A.
5. Paste A into empty measures where B was.
Now all you have to do is get rid of the empty measures where A was originally located.
In a one staff score:
6. Delete those measures.
With more than one staff:
6. Cut B
7. Paste B where A was in the beginning.
8. Delete x empty measures.

More steps than above counted, but not that many more.

Hi azumbrunn, You're suggestion is a pretty good one. If I had bind keys to insert/delete a measure, it might be a pretty fast workaround.

To summarise "Swap Notes":

1. Select a range of (source) measures and cut/copy.
2. Select a destination measure.
3. Apply paste. The clipboard contents are swapped with the overwritten destination measure(s).
4. Paste again at the source.

Does this work vertically across multiple staves like the current cut/copy/paste commands?

Just to clarify, has the default behavior of paste been changed? Normally the user doesn't want the clipboard modified by pasting. Right? I should be able to use CMD-V several times to post the same thing several times.

This issue reminds me of the old Hewlett Packard calculators (mid seventies?) which had what they called a "stack", a sort of clipboard that could hold four numbers on top of each other that each would be available for calculations (making the use of brackets unnecessary). It took some time to get used to it but it was incredible flexible and fast.

The default behavior of paste has not been changed. Let me amend Geetar's summary :

1. Select a range of (source) measures and cut/copy.
2. Select a destination measure.
3. Apply Swap Clipboard and Selection. The clipboard contents are swapped with the overwritten destination measure(s).
4. Paste again at the source.

And yes, it works across staves, even across different scores, just like regular copy/cut/paste. It's pretty awesome, actually :-) Thanks to Jon and everyone else who contributed to this discussion, which I think produced a great solution.

Hi Marc, can you summarise the use-model of this new feature?
Am I still able to press CMD-V several times to paste the same thing multiple times? Or does every CMD-V swap in the selected region again?

As explained above, there is no change to any existing command. Copy, Cut, and Paste all work exactly the same as always. There a just a brand new command Swap that works as explained above.

Could you post a link to which "above" you are referring to?

See responses 14, 16, 17, and 37. 14 (the "third option" presented) is the original proposal. 16 and 17 confirmed it. 34 attempted to summarize the new feature but contained an error - incorrectly suggesting that the behavior of "paste" was going to be changed to do a swap instead. 37 clarified that paste and swap are two different commands.

Since it is merged, you should be able to easily build this and see for yourself how it works.

But again, to be absolutely perfectly clear: nothing has changed about the existing copy, cut, or paste commands,. They continue to work *exactly* as before. The only thing that has changed is the addition of a single new "swap" command, that works to exchange the contents of the clipboard with the contents of the destination.

My comment #37 .

Should we have a default keyboard shortcut for the new 'swap' command? If so, is there any consensus in the rest of the computer world about what it would be?

I may have suggested Ctrl-B as it's the next key along the keyboard from CTRL-X/C/V, but we already use CTRL-B for 'Insert Single Measure'. (It would also conflict with CTRL-B while editing text, which is for Bold. BTW, does the swap command actually work while editing text, or just for music?)

//peterellisjones.com/post/70523368919/cut-copy-paste-swap (referred to in comment #16) uses CMD-SHIFT-X (on Macs). Given the relative infrequency of using the command, this is probably as good a choice as any.

Did that yesterday: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2621 ;-)

And yes, it works with text editing, too.

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

I know I'm the one who initially suggested calling this "Swap Clipboard and Selection," but I'm now thinking "Swap with Clipboard," which is what this is called in EditPadPro , is better. I defer to Jon Enquist on this one; what do you think?

I like "Swap with Clipboard," particularly since the current selection will often be extended if the clipboard contents are larger. "Swap Clipboard and (Selection plus more as necessary)" would be quite cumbersome ;)

All right, then. Thank you very much again for contributing!