Several requests for improving workflow
1. "Drag" document by holding middle scroll wheel button, anywhere. Right now, I can only drag in open areas where there are no objects with the left mouse button. It's extremely annoying.
2. Stop deselecting measures/objects when I drag the document.
3. When I hold down shift, it should select the entire measure, not the object. The shift key should not be performing the same functions as a regular left-click or ctrl+left click.
4. You know how ctrl+shift+→ or ctrl+shift+← selects measures to the left and right? Well apparently ctrl+shift+↑ and ctrl+shift+↓ doesn't exist. Would be useful if you could select the staves below/above it.
Comments
In case you aren't aware, dragging the canvas is only intended for occasional small movements of the canvas. The usual way to move the canvas is use the mouse wheel, or the page up/down and home/end keys. Also the Navigator. I doubt most pepople have three button mice, but the idea of allowing middle button to initiate drag for those who do isn't bad.
Not sure what you mean about shift. The purpose of shift+click is to select everything from the current selection to the point where you clicked. This is how it works in virtually all programs on all OS's as far as I know: click on object, shift+click another to select everything between them. To select a whole measure, you click an empty spot within in, or use the usual method of click first note, shift+click last.
Shift+Left/Right (note Ctrl) extend the selection one note at a time Shift+Up/Down work to select the staff above/below. There would be no point having Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down duplicate this; that shortcut is used instead for something else (transpose selection diatonically). But if you orefer, you can switch them, or make other customizations, in Edit / Preferences / Shortcuts.
In reply to In case you aren't aware, by Marc Sabatella
Forgot to mention horizontal scrolling; I use the scroll wheel for vertical scrolling so no problems there. You have to hold shift and scroll with the wheel if you want to scroll left or right. It would speed up the workflow if I didn't have to constantly hold shift to take a quick peak to the left/right. Right now, the middle mouse button is unused.
You're misunderstanding me or you actually didn't try it. A shift+click in the traditional sense "highlights" a measure (as in draws a box around a measure). When I say "Objects" I am referring to notes, articulations, dynamics, clefs, etc. within a measure. When I hold shift and click inside a measure, I sometimes accidentally click on the stem or beam to my annoyance. If I wanted to select the stem or beam, I could have accomplished that by just left clicking on the object. To give you an idea, imagine how difficult it would be to highlight sentences in a Word document if you had to avoid clicking on the characters directly. To make the shift+click function work, you'd have to click on the empty space next to the character!
Just tried it again on a full orchestra score. It's unpredictable... Open a full orchestra score and add some notes and whole rests in the first measure. Then test it out by holding shift and pressing up or down. It sometimes stops highlighting up to a certain staff or not at all. It sometimes highlight a measure partially.
Btw, transposing a selection by an octave is simply ctrl+up/down. ctrl+shift+up or down doesn't do anything. Shift+left/right partially selects a measure to the right or left. ctrl+shift+left/right selects the entire measure to the left or right. Do you know what the user's intuition will be when it's down/up (shift and shift+ctrl)?
In reply to In case you aren't aware, by Anonymous
It's possible I am misunderstanding you about shift+click, but I think actually you are misunderstanding how it works. MuseScore has two different types of selection: individual selections and range selections. The latter is what draws the blue box. Click by itself on an element selects that element as an individual selection only. Shift+click creates a range selection. If an element or range was already selected, the new range extends from there to the element you shift+clicked. If nothing was selected already, shift+click will create a range selection for just that note or rest. If you shift+click something other than a note or rest, you are asking MuseScore to extend the range selection to something other than a note or rest, which does not compute. Don't think of shift+click as the "select a measure" command because it is not - it is the "extend a range selection to this note or rest" command.
Selecting a measure is done by clicking an empty spot within the measure - with or without shift. It's not normally that hard to find an empty spot, but if you are zoomed out far or have an unusually dense measure, you can also use click the first note, shift+click last as I said before. Or click any note, ctrl+shift+left to extend to the beginning, ctrl+shift+right to extend to end. I suppose some special additional modifier like ctrl+shift+click could be used as yet another way to select a measure. But FWIW, I select sentences in word processors with ctrl+shift+right/left, same way I select measures in MuseScore.
Shift+up/down *does* extend the current selection up or down one staff. Shift+left/right, again, extends a selection one note/rest at a time. I did mispeak about the diatonic transposition shortcut - it's alt+shift+up/down. Ctrl+shift+down is the shortcut for creating cross-staff notation in piano music (or other instruments with multple staves). But these should all work perfectly consistently. If you have a particular score and a particular sequence of steps that shows otherwise, please post the score and give precise step by step instructions to reproduce the bug, but it does work consistently in all cases I have tried.