when advancing to next note in lyrics input mode, auto-select existing syllable if present

• Jan 30, 2015 - 22:21
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore

When entering lyrics and advancing to the next note, if that note already has lyrics, MuseScore currently places the cursor at the end of the existing syllable, ready to append additional text. However, in most cases, a user will be attempting to overwrite existing lyrics. Therefore, it would make the most sense to have existing syllables automatically selected so that typing will replace them. This is the same way that Finale handles this.

Comments

• Jan 31, 2015 - 16:25

See #24753: Lyric text selected by default upon navigating under a note?. Although I mentioned the case of simply fixing a typo as a reaosn to preserve the current behavior, I don't buy that any more. At least, I'm not understanding what made me say the current behavior would be more efficient. You would still need to use the cursor to navigate to the spot within the syllabe where the typo was (or click), and it would be the same number of motions either way.

I was going to say, what if you just wanted to hit space / hyphen / underscore to move to the next syllable, and was afraid that doing this with the lyric selected would delete it, but it doesn't.

So right now, I'm not seeing any reason *not* to select the lyric on entry. Can anyone else think of one? Should be easy enough to change this.

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• Feb 2, 2015 - 17:02

One question: right now, there is code when moving to a new syallable using space or cursor keys to position the cursor at the beginning of the syllable when moving forward, or to the end of the syllable when moving backwards. I can certainly make it so that the syllable is always selected, and also keep the behavior so that when moving forwards, the cursor is positioned at the beginning of the (selected) syllable. But does this strike anyone as a bit strange? I can't say why, but it seems slightly unexpected to me.

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