Zoom to Selected Item

• Jun 26, 2018 - 16:08
Reported version
2.2
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Project

Currently when zooming in, MuseScore zooms to the center of the page in the view window.

If the user is working on a particular area that does not happen to be exactly at the center of the work window, then they are obliged to drag repeatedly after zoom, to find the thing they were working on.

It would be good if MuseScore were programmed to zoom directly to the selected item, to avoid users potentially losing their place in their score every time they zoom in.


Comments

Am I correct that you are using the zoom dropdown box on the toolbar? Try using pinch-to-zoom if you can, or Ctrl+mouse wheel. In either case, zoom is centered around the mouse cursor (or your fingers). Also, you will probably want to make sure that "Limit scroll area to page borders" is off.

Indeed, zoom already centers on the cursor when using pinch, Ctrl+wheel, or a similar gesture. To me this is superior than depending on whether something is selected and worry about whether there are multiple elements selected and whether they are in fact currently in view, what is the selection is already larger than the current view, etc.

However, the keyboard shortcut ignore the mouse position, and that to me isn't ideal. I guess the mouse might not be within the window either, so that's an issue. Not sure what the best way to handle this is. Maybe in that case looking at the selection and trying to do something reasonable in the "easy" cases isn't a bad idea.

If multiple items are selected the zoom should center on the middle of the selected items. This applies to using the drop down or shortcuts. Finding the middle of a rectangle isn't that hard. The ctrl+mouse wheel already centers on the cursor location which makes sense and is consistent with other programs.

But consider, your selection might be the entire score, or an entire staff, or a range consisting of the last measure of one system and the first of the next, or it might be a list selection consisting of one dynamic on page 3 plus one accent mark on page 17. "Middle of selected items" is not necessarily a well-defined concept except in the case where the selection just happens to be a rectangle. And I'm not crazy about the idea of special-casing that - would make things seem inconsistent. I still think I'd rather see MuseScore use the mouse position. But it's certainly worth further discussion,