Update rest icon to show other durations than quarter rest

I'm not particularly good with this either, but thought I'd mention some other ideas I can recall being mentioned (or maybe I made some of them up):

1) have the rest toggle icon change appearance according to the selected duration (as mentioned above)
2) have the note duration icons change to display images of the corresponding rests if the rest toggle icon is selected (but would it be weird to have a row of rest durations icons plus a rest toggle icon?)
3) do away with the rest toggle icon and just have 10 more duration icons for the rests (this can also save a click when changing between note and rest and changing duration at the same time)
4) allow rests to be entered without needing to pre-selecting any sort of rest mode, by some special click operation - eg, Alt+click, or maybe double-click (this wouldn't be easily discoverable, but would probably the single most *efficient* way of doing mouse entry)

I would actually like the see rest input be both more intuitive *and* more efficient. Well, it's already optimally efficient when using the keyboard, and can be made so when using MIDI, but there is still one extra click to deal with when using the mouse - and no obvious way to enter rests at all from the Piano Keyboard (except of course to switch to another method).

So for me, #4 helps the efficiency and could be considered *in addition* to a method that helps with intuitiveness but doesn't address efficiency. #3 is the only one on the list that does both at once, but even so, #4 would save a click there too. I agree that one should be able to think of entering a rest as just like entering a note except with a "special" pitch, but nothing about mouse entry currently supports that line of thinking. You have to use this whole different method where you enable "rest mode" as a submode of "note input mode". #4 is the only suggestion above that actually makes rest entry more like note entry, but of course it is no more discoverable than any other method.

#1 and #2 help with discoverability, but indeed, #2 more so than #1 *if* we adopt your icon or one like it. But even for #1, I think that seeing the rest toggle icon change appearance as you change note durations would help discoverability. I'm doubt it's particular hard to change icons on the fly, and maybe we *should* change from play to pause during playback.

It is of course worth looking at how other programs do this.

I immediately thought of #2 & #3 when I read the title. I don't like #1 alone.

Let me also suggest an idea #5 for mouse input:

Currently mscore only allows user to input a note/rest at a currently-existing segment. This works great for keyboard, but when using a mouse, I would like to be able to position my cursor at any division of the measure (based on the selected duration) and plop an note, without inputting resets prior (mscore will input those for me). The blue "shadow note" will appear where these divisions of the measure are, to let user know. This would speed up the common case of non-synocpated music (but if I wanted to insert say a quarter note on an offbeat, would still have to input an 8th rest first).

EDIT: let me call (#5a) mean the above where permitted divisions of measure are deteremined by selected duration. Let me call (#5b) mean permitted divisions of measure be determined by a grid setting (either selected via preferences, or maybe a pulldown menu on toolbar).

You can find the rests SVG at https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore_design/tree/master/icons/24/acti…
It should be doable to make a icon with multiple rests on it.
Switching the icons should be easy to do in MuseScore::updateInputState().

Although my personal preference would be option 2 and have the current rest-icon become a rest/note toggle icon(?) perhaps this svg helps out shortterm?

It uses the real svg-data from the quarter and eight rests, the half rest has been reworked to be less wide for a better fit.

I think this is a great idea! "Currently mscore only allows user to input a note/rest at a currently-existing segment. This works great for keyboard, but when using a mouse, I would like to be able to position my cursor at any division of the measure (based on the selected duration) and plop an note, without inputting resets prior (mscore will input those for me). The blue "shadow note" will appear where these divisions of the measure are, to let user know."

Thank you so much for helping out with this. I'm not sure if it may be an optical illusion, but is the image not quite centered?
Oh yes, I just quickly threw something together then. rest.svg is now aligned as follows:

I've also made a vertical swap of the half and eight rest in an attempt to lessen the visual emptyness between the quarter and the eight rest in the above sample. Don't know which one is turning out better though (see rest-swapped.svg)

I'd drop the line under the half rest, so it is valid for half and whole rest ;-)

Adjusted as per IRC with Jojo. svg-with-alignmentgrid added for reference and possible future improvements.

New icon within the guides:

There you go, the eight rest wasn't just swapped but also slightly moved down- and inwards to better fill the area visually imo:

And just for the fun of it:

"Let the alignment preference wars begin!"

I vote for #16 :-)

However, I also liked #12 with the half rest (to me it looks nicer, because there is actually no rest symbol without the line in real life), that takes into account that you cannot create a full measure rest (also displayed by a full rest) using this button. But that's probably not so important.

You can create a whole rest though

Darn.. forgot to remove the 5px padding I had included during testing. Also made the way the color is set to the block rest conform with the others.

If that doesn't fix the size, then I can also upscale this one to not have internal padding (the green border of alignment). Currently this is the same as with the original rest.svg icon though.

Do you want me to make one with the half rest on top instead of the block? After all, we're not showing 16th rests on there either… so who cares about a whole rest (sorry Jojo :) )

I sortof liked the half rest...it made the eighth rest look like a person wearing a hat. :)

More useful criticism: the half rest is more recognizable than the simple dash. I agree with #16 that the dash just looks like a tenuto marking. Anyway, we are not trying to include every type of rest in the icon, since we are not including 16th, 32nd, 64th rests, so no need to try to have a dual half/whole rest which ends up looking like neither (without the context of a staff line).

Anyway, when a whole rest is in voice 1 without any staff line for reference, it still doesn't look like a dash:

So I vote for a hat.

The block below the 1/8 is most satisfying to me.

OK. lets call these the final contestants unless some major improvement can be made:

@Isaac: did you have a chance to test whether the alignment within MuseScore is now better?

@Isaac, go ahead and PR, you're all set anyway.

or rather the rest icon change to the selected duration

Fixed in branch master, commit 6867b0e1b7

Fix #99476: Update rest icon to show other durations than quarter rest

Fixed in branch master, commit 9c653209ab

Merge pull request #2674 from IsaacWeiss/99476-rest-icon

Fix #99476: Update rest icon to show other durations than quarter rest

Fixed in branch 2.0.4, commit f1f49fc65b

Fix #99476: Update rest icon to show other durations than quarter rest

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

Hat guy now leans on the edge, as the lazy resting rest he is ;)