Again on the left-right-up-down thingy.

Dorico
#1

I would think the funktion of the <- -> keys should be to move quickly along the notes in a stave.

If it selects slurs and other objects, it interrupts the movement from note to note -
selecting things that are no noteheads and breaks should need a modifier key.

And I would prefere to have the up and down keys to change the pitch of a notehead.
Change the stave is imho a secondary task, should need a modifier key.

Please, could you rethink this concept? Using the ALT key every time
when I push a note up and down, often takes me out, to the menu, or I get
noteheads changed to breaks and so on. This does not work fluently.

Maybe, you could give us a option to determine what the left-right-up-down-keys
with / without ALT do?

#2

Thanks for the feedback. We’re unlikely to revisit this in the near term as we have a lot of functionality that we have to attend to. I’m quite happy with the current behaviour in that it mirrors very closely the graphical navigation that is provided by Engrave mode, except that it works at the macro level, i.e. it only selects whole items rather than parts of larger items.

You will in Dorico 1.0.20 be able to redefine the key commands that are mapped to the arrow keys, with Alt and Ctrl+Alt, so if you really want to make the up/down arrow keys change the pitches of notes instead of navigate, you’ll be able to do that.

#3

I’d like to reopen this…
First: Alt-Up and Alt-Down, not longer my problem, got accustomed to it quickly.

And UP-DOWN comes handy to move quickly up and down within the notes of a chord.

But it is here where I find a first issue:
Given a g-minor chord , up to down g - d - bb - g.
Starting with the upper g, moving down … skips the bb. To select the bb, I have to
go to the bottom g DOWN-DOWN then UP ??? Strange.
I cannot see any logical reason, why the chord notes should not be selected in the sequence they appear in the chord.
Why should notes with accidentals be jumped over? Makes moving complicated and slower then needed.
For me it’s “third note down”, so I hit quickly Down-Down-Down … end end up in another staff, and UP does not bring me back to the chord I worked on.

This would be like in a text processor, when you have a word with an german umlaut, and the cursor skips over it and one has to go back then to select it.
Real fun!

Second issue, and reopening the part on the horizontal movement:
I really would like to have at least a switch: “left right move to previous/next note” versus “left rigth move to previous/next object”
With the first option, I could quickly move through the notes only, and I would have to go UP to select a slur etc.
For users with a more object-oriented aproach the second option.

#4

+1 on the “only notes on arrow keys in write mode”

I’ve now spent quite some time working on a large project for wind band (about 30 staves) and have found my ways around Dorico pretty well.

But when I try to quickly navigate around using the arrow keys always and again other things get in my way and draw my focus to them and away from the task at hand.
To sum it up: Navigating with arrow keys is too unpredictable for me as to make my workflow faster. Is there any rule that tells me exactly what note of the next stave underneath the current one will be selected if I press down?

I’ve found myself in a situation where I already had some notes across multiple staves selected. I had started ad the top, pressed and worked my way down by pressing . See here:

Then I started thinking about which note Dorico would select next if I pressed the down key again. I would have expected Dorico to add the long note on the next staff to the selection, because this is where the cursor would go to if you had only the Eb (3rd staff) selected and pressed .
But no, Dorico jumped right over all three staves (!) with the long notes and selected the next dotted quarter note underneath. Totally unexpected to me, and I could not find anything about this behaviour in the help files. Does Dorico always select notes only on the same beat once there are more than on e note being already selected?

Please make this more predictable. There are so many times that what I want to do differs from what Dorico does that I use the arrow keys for navigation or selection less and less, using the mouse instead which is even clumsier when you try to do precise selections…
select_notes.gif

#5

I agree that arrow keys to navigate is not working for me, for the same reason, in Write mode.
Related to this is the undo behaviour, which I’d like the option of it just affecting material changes, rather than my somewhat random intervening selections.

#6

Coming from Finale, I tend to agree on both of these counts. I can see the benefit of restricting the arrow keys (without modifier) to navigation in write mode when dealing with chords, provided the order of selection is predictable, of course. However, in monophonic situations, the current behaviour is not practical.

Similarly, the undo behaviour can be a benefit in some situations, while a nuisance in others. It would be great to be able to chose between these undo behaviours and assign them to specific keyboard shortcuts. By default, cmd–option–Z/Y (which are both currently unassigned, as far as I know) could be used to skip backward/forward to the previous/next material change.

#7

I don’t know for sure, just thinking… I believe Dorico skips the long notes in Estigy’s post, because technically there isn’t a note there. That measure is empty, because the note is a long note that starts in the previous bar. I might have that wrong, but that’s what I think is happening.

Robby

#8

Robby, in my example, if you only have the note on the 3rd staff selected and press down, you will actually land on this next long note. It will not be skipped. That’s what puzzles me. Dorico behaves differently when there is more than one note selected.

#9

Working in Dorico I almost stopped working with the arrow keys for navigating.
I use more and more the mouse, which is slower.
I hope that, in the future there, will be a way to choose how the arrow keys behave while navigating.

#10

I agree with this suggestion that I would very much like some sort of a navigational shortcut to move horizontally (temporally) along the notes on a staff. For example, if I have input a whole line of music and need to add slurs, I either need to extensively use the mouse or be extremely vigilant that I am selecting the note I think I am selecting — as opposed to being able to very quickly navigate around and add slurs where necessary. It’s fantastic that Dorico makes it possible to select everything with keyboard shortcuts, and I don’t think it should be eliminated, just that much of the time that is not what I want to do; I want to move along the staff horizontally.

So how about giving us some sort of a command (we can map to some keystroke) that would just select the next item of the same type? If we had a note selected, it would go to the next horizontal note. If we had a slur, it would go to the next slur. This would be really useful also, since I try to look at every item when really finishing a score.

#11

+1 for horizontal navigation of notes only.

#12

+1
Unlike myriads of other great new concepts in Dorico I too am constantly fighting the navigation algorithm, and do not find it useful. If there would be and option to make it more constrained, either to notes, or to rhythmic position, and that it highlights next logical object in a group, not the closest one graphically — I would be very grateful!

#13

Just FYI, the team is aware, and hopes to address it with more improved functionality in the future. https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=141330&hilit=horizontal+arrow#p770152