Turn off ability to click stems?

• Nov 11, 2018 - 18:32

This is by far one of the most aggravating aspects of musescore. I have googled for this topic and have not found anything useful.
The only thing I am ever trying to select is the note head, so I can copy and paste or change the note, or just hear it played.
HOWEVER, a solid 50-60 percent of the time, the stem is selected instead. This would not be a big deal if I could simply click on the notehead immediately after, but this is not the case. When a stem is selected, the program seems to lag, and does nothing happens when I click the note head. I have to click somewhere else in a white space, and THEN make sure I get the note head on the first try. When you are in a flow and trying to do things quickly, these seconds of waiting add up and being increasingly frustrating. Has no one else had an issue with this?


Comments

In reply to by Jm6stringer

I appreciate the help. However, constantly zooming in and out to select notes becomes even more time consuming when you have to do it so frequently.
Further, changing the proximity will also alter the note head as well, no?
Considering the other comment here has never experienced the lag I am talking about, could this just be an issue with my system? To reiterate, if I purposely select a stem, and then immediately click the notehead instead, nothing happens.

In reply to by cab44441

"To reiterate, if I purposely select a stem, and then immediately click the notehead instead, nothing happens."
Works just fine here, as always (see animation). How you could do in other way and don't obtain the same thing? (if not, please give details and attach a score or excerpt showing whay you say)

"could this just be an issue with my system?"
And what is your system?

Video.gif

In reply to by cab44441

You wrote:
...changing the proximity will also alter the note head as well, no?
Smaller numbers require more precision, making it harder to click on small objects. You can try it and change it back if not your cup of tea.

Also:
... if I purposely select a stem, and then immediately click the notehead instead, nothing happens.

When I purposefully, or accidentally, select a stem via single click, and then immediately click the notehead, the notehead becomes selected.
However, double clicking on the stem puts it in edit mode, which requires exiting (Esc key, or clicking in a white space) before further selecting.

BTW: I'm on Windows OS.

In reply to by Jm6stringer

I'm with Jm6stringer on this. I'll elaborate a little. Many times I have inadvertently double clicked a stem when I didn't realize I clicked it the first time, then too quickly clicked it again to put it in edit mode. Nothing works except Escape or click on white space at this point.

One thing Marc pondered on these forums at one point was making a click on an item select things that are obscured by the item. So if you click on a notehead and get a stem, you would be able to get the notehead (or something else obscured by the stem) by clicking while the stem is selected. Implementing this would make putting the stem in edit mode less likely. The problem with the implementation is that its uses are going to be far fewer in version 3.0 since it will mostly avoid items on top of each other.

In reply to by mike320

Upon further experimentation, this is my issue. Another thing I noticed however is that sometimes when you are in edit mode, immediately clicking on the notehead afterwards does work, and sometimes not at all.
I assume there is no way to just turn off double click edit mode altogether? It's something I never purposely use.
Even if it would require some sort of plugin coding or digging around I'd be willing to do that to make musescore more conducive to my workflow.

In reply to by mike320

Indeed, I even submitted a PR to address this a bit. It actually did two things. First, to make the area around the notehead a little bigger so it overlapped the stem, thus making it less likely you'd click the stem. Second, it made it so that repeated Ctrl+clicks in the same spot would cycle through overlapping elements (right now it just selects/deselects the same element over and over). Got a few comments, but no one seemed particularly excited and nothing came of it. It's true 3.0 will include less overlap, but it still happens, and I think this is still a valid enhancement. Certainly doesn't hurt.

No idea if the code still works, but here is a link: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2622

FWIW, I have also sometimes seen the anomaly that after clicking something to select it, it's hard to click something else. No, I didn't double-click, although that's probably a common mistake. No idea what triggers this.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I experience the same anomaly in cases like a dynamic and notehead are in the same spot, I can't select one of them or two texts are on the same spot but I can only select the one I don't want. Of course you could move the item you don't want selected, move/fix the other item them move the first back, but being able to select what you want would be much better.

BTW, if you only put the PR on github then few non-programmers will see it. The comments you got seemed mostly to be your implementation of it, which is what I'd expect.

In reply to by mike320

Well, I am pretty sure did post about it here too, but unfortunately I can't find it. I know the thinking began as a result of this discussion: https://musescore.org/en/node/106121, which was shortly before the PR, so probably it's another thread from around that same time.

FWIW, it is the mention of Inkscape in the PR that makes me pretty sure there is another discussion of this somewhere. Someone else told me about that, but I can't find where.

What sometimes happen to me is that I try to click the notehead, but I accidentally click on the stem. Because I do not see the notehead turn blue/green or whatever colour the current voice is highlighted and the stem is so thin I do not see it change colour immediately if I did not expect it to change colour, I click again immediately almost as a reflex reaction. This of course puts the stem into edit mode. It is a bit annoying, but also easy to correct by just pressing the Esc key.

I too NEVER want to select note stems. On my smaller laptop screen, composing takes double the time because of this. I don't see why there is no option to disable selecting note stems, especially since the issue was raised in April 2016 and just dismissed by the people here...

In reply to by ZachWood

It wasn't dismissed, it was taken seriously and fixed. If you click and get the wrong thing, press ctrl while you click the same spot and something else will be selected. You o course have to have a version with this feature. I don't remember when it was added but I know it's in 3.2.3 and not 2.1.

In reply to by ZachWood

Not only did we implement Ctrl to select things covered by other things, but we also changed how notes and stems interact, so it should be much easier to select notes now - stems are ignored unless you click pretty far away from the notehead. This change was made I think, in one of the 3.0.x releases. EDIT: actually it was 3.1, see #284493: Let Ctrl+click cycle through selection of overlapping elements

So in general, this should be a non-issue now (current version 3.2.3). If you are still encountering some sort of issue where notes are hard to select, please attach the score you are having trouble and give us steps to reproduce the problem so we can investigate further.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks Marc, I updated my musescore to 3.2.3 before posting and didn't really get into using it enough to appreciate how much better it works now.
I am very happy with how that turned out, I just somehow expected adding the note stems to the selection filter was the obvious and easier fix and thus posted my annoyance inappropriately.

In reply to by ZachWood

No problem, I'm glad my little tweak (it was just a couple of lines of code I threw in when implementing the change to allow Ctrl+click to cycle through overlapping elements) really makes a difference for people in practice! I don't personally work tend to work with my score zoomed small enough for this ever to be an issue for me, but when I do try it, I can definitely see how it was harder before and easier now.

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