A handful of feature requests/interface ideas

• Feb 22, 2020 - 16:52
Reported version
3.4
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

Hi all. I'm relatively new—since V3.x, lets' say—user, and am lovin' MuseScore. Here are some thoughts about interface. Hope they might be useful.

  • Wouldn’t it make more sense to have “Copy Lyrics to Clipboard” under the Edit menu, right under Copy? And maybe just call it “Copy Lyrics,” since things that are copied are by definition copied to the clipboard? AND, maybe a “Export Lyrics” option as part of the Export command? This is where I looked for it, but didn’t find it.

  • By the same token, shouldn’t “Remove Selected Range” be under the Edit menu?

  • Selection options seem haphazardly placed. Some are in the Selection Filter, while for others, we need to right-click to get at them. Inconsistent.

  • In the palettes search field it’d be nice if we could double click the text string to select it (to then replace it with whatever we’re typing), as an alternative to clicking the deletion X. As is now, 2ble clicking doesn’t select the text. (also, clicking the deletion X doesn’t then make the cursor active in the text field, as one would think it would.)

  • It’d be nice to be able to select a number of disparate elements (such as DS, Coda, segno, for example) and apply a color to them all at once in the inspector. Currently, have to do one at a time.

    • Sometimes, to set color, I have to choose color in Inspector, click ok in the color chooser, and the color is set. Other instances, I have to do that AND click “Set Color” after choosing the color, for then new color to actually take effect.
  • In general, I find the location of text-related Style settings confusing. Why are there two separate places for every kind of text, and why are they divided as they are? It can be hard to figure out where to look for different parameters.


Comments

Please report one issue/suggestion per thread. This is an issue tracker, not a feedback platform. We cannot possibly track all of them in a single thread.

> Wouldn’t it make more sense to have “Copy Lyrics to Clipboard” under the Edit menu, right under Copy? And maybe just call it “Copy Lyrics,” since things that are copied are by definition copied to the clipboard? AND, maybe a “Export Lyrics” option as part of the Export command? This is where I looked for it, but didn’t find it.

There's a possible GSoC project about lyrics text editor that may include these. Check it out here.

> By the same token, shouldn’t “Remove Selected Range” be under the Edit menu?

I don't have MuseScore (or easy access to a computer) right now, but if this is indeed missing, it's not hard to realize this, since the functionality (I don't know what exactly you were saying, just removing the notes or removing the measures altogether?) can already be done via shortcuts.

> Selection options seem haphazardly placed. Some are in the Selection Filter, while for others, we need to right-click to get at them. Inconsistent.

Not inconsistent. The selection filter and options in the right-click menu are for different usages.

> In the palettes search field it’d be nice if we could double click the text string to select it (to then replace it with whatever we’re typing), as an alternative to clicking the deletion X. As is now, 2ble clicking doesn’t select the text. (also, clicking the deletion X doesn’t then make the cursor active in the text field, as one would think it would.)

Not sure how hard it would be to realize these.

> It’d be nice to be able to select a number of disparate elements (such as DS, Coda, segno, for example) and apply a color to them all at once in the inspector. Currently, have to do one at a time.

You can already change colours for a group of different kinds of elements. After you select them, you can see a field filled with black (or another colour) in the inspector. Click on it and then select the desired colour.

> Sometimes, to set color, I have to choose color in Inspector, click ok in the color chooser, and the color is set. Other instances, I have to do that AND click “Set Color” after choosing the color, for then new color to actually take effect.

I don't usually change colours, so I cannot help you with this now. But it is hard to believe such inconsistency is present (or even possible to be present). I assume the different results are because of different occasions, like changing colour(s) for one element or several elements, but since you don't know how to do the latter, it may not be the case.

> In general, I find the location of text-related Style settings confusing. Why are there two separate places for every kind of text, and why are they divided as they are? It can be hard to figure out where to look for different parameters.

You mean in the inspector and at the bottom of the screen? Well, the inspector is for the general style settings, but if you want to change the style for only some words or characters, you can select them and use the options down below. So nothing strange here. It is recommended to always use the inspector to change general style, if there aren't going to be minor changes for some words/characters.

Hello, good to see you here!

As Howard says, it's better to stick to one suggestion per issue, and/or to use the Forums first for discussion. But I do have some additional feedback here on your specific suggestions:

1) & 2) we've gone back and forth on. Also, back when "Remove Selected Range" was in the Edit menu, it was called "Delete Measures" when but there was confusion about what "Delete" meant in this context. There's still confusion, so we're currently discussing the idea of replacing "Delete" with "Clear" in the places where it is used. See #301471: Delete option in Measure context and Edit menus is confusing since it does not delete the measure

3) yes, it can be confusing I agree, but there are differences that can help clarify. The Selection Filter is all about taking a range selection (with blue rectangle) and excluding things from it while keeping it a whole range. The right-click menu options (also buttons in the Inspector) are about building "list" selections, which can be discontiguous and have no rectangle. Range and list selections are very different in terms of the things you can do with them. And yet we don't do a great job of presenting this. We do have a professional designer who recently joined the team, I could see this being something he might want to look at.

4) next version of MuseScore will automatically select the text in the search field when transferring control there (eg, via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F9, or using F9 to toggle the palettes as a whole). But double-click makes sense too. This is worth submitting a separate Suggestion for here in the issue tracker.

5) it should be possible to change color for multiple items at once - even if they are of different types. When multiple elements are selected, you do indeed need to press the "Set Color" button, and I agree that's extremely non-obvious. Luckily, there is current work to completely redesign the Inspector and great simplify working with multiple elements, other things.

6) it's not totally clear what you mean here, feel free to clarify.

Thanks, Marc, for your reply. Nice to get a warm and welcoming reply to my first post, being new in these parts 'n' all, and not yet knowing how things are done here. And I do now understand why it would be more helpful to post ideas individually and will do so in the future. As to Howard's comment, "This is an issue tracker, not a feedback platform," I would very much like to know where the feedback platform is. I actually took some time looking for a feedback platform, but this is the closest I found.

I'll make a new post to clarify what I was trying to say about text styles.

Thanks for choosing to see our responses as warm and welcoming rather than nit-picking :-)

In the Support menu above, click Forums, and you'll see a list of the various forums available. The big three are "Support and Bug Reports", "Feature Requests", and "General Discussion". Often there is considerable gray area of course. The "Support and Bug Reports" forum is also where you are taken if, from within MuseScore, you choose "Help / Ask for Help".

What usually happens is people ask for help on some topic, or have idea for an improvement, and the forums are where we hash things out and decide if there is an actual bug, a missing feature, a misunderstanding, or what. And then once things are more clear we direct people here for official "tracking" of any specific bug reports or suggestions that arise from the discussion.