Suggestion for use of coloured shortcuts - and indeed colours generally.

• Mar 31, 2021 - 09:58

This suggestion contains two conceptual parts:

  1. There might be several kinds of shortcuts. Several categories could/should be defined.

For example:
Standard - inadvisable to change - for example to avoid conflicts with OS shortcuts

Standard +OS - as above - but OS specific - might be slightly different between OS versions - Windows, Linux, MacOS

Standard + Language - as above but with slight differences between different language keyboards.

User defined - shortcuts for a single user - which may over-ride some other shortcuts - but possibly subject to some constraints to avoid problems and conflicts

User defined + Group shortcuts for a group of users (for example in a school environment)
Here a group of collaborators might defines shortcuts which can be useful for them.

Having defined the types of shortcuts, it could not be very helpful to have ...

  1. Coloured coding of the shortcuts.
    Here the intention is to try to show the differences between types of shortcuts, and also to help users avoid
    over riding existing "essential" shortcuts.

Some users might want to have more of their own shortcuts, but at least by colour coding these in the listings, this would make things clearer when trying to make up a new shortcut - or over write an existing one.

A futher refinement - though possible complication - is to have the colour codes user assignable.
Whether that might things too complicated I can't say - but it might help users who are colour blind - for example Red Green colour blind people.

So rather than referring to Colour codes as Red, Green etc. use Numeric codes - 1,2,3 etc. each associated with a different class of shortcut. Then assign the numbered codes to actual colours. That way if it were found that many users preferred purple to green the assignment of the colours to the numbered codes would just be a remapping - not a complete recoding. Individual users would then also be able to make up their own colour coding scheme. This is just a basic computer indirection technique, which would increase the flexibility of the system.

Colours could be useful for many of us in other contexts, and might enhance MuseScore considerably.

[It was suggested that I raise this using the Issue tracker - but since I've never used that - and it doesn't seem appropriate - I've put it here/]


Comments

This forum is better for discussing and refining an idea, but to me your idea makes perfect sense as is, no further discussion really needed. Doesn't hurt though I guess. Still, after a consensus is reached, you would need to submit it to the issue tracker in order to not be forgotten. It's no especially hard - just click the link the Support menu above. Severity is "Suggestion".

There’s no such thing as standard system shortcuts on Linux, for example. Every desktop environment and every window manager has their own.

Colours would confuse me.

The debate of which is an essential shortcut and which isn’t is going to be axe-throwing during a bikeshedding competition. This is immensely user-related. (I recently unmapped ^P for example, which many would consider essential, but given I just export to PDF if I need something printed then throw the PDF at the printer, which works better than any in-program attempt to print…) There are engravers, composers, listeners, and probably other “base classes” of MuseScore users, who have so divergent needs…

In reply to by mirabilos

I think though that Qt does recognize certainly shortcuts as coming from the system and provides defaults for through it's own magic. So there is a very real difference between how Save or Print are treated within MuseScore versus how Join Selected measures is. That's something that could be color coded easily enough if enough users find it valuable.

And I definitely would love to see an obvious indication of which shortcuts are still at their default value versus which have been customized.

I agree though that "essential" is pretty hopelessly subjective.

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