Arrow key navigation

Hello everyone,

Just thought I would write and ask… am I the only one having an issue with arrow key navigation :question:

It just doesn’t make any sense to me—

  1. How the selection jumps from note to note to dynamics to slurs to other things, then suddenly across many bars to a tempo marking, then across a hairpin to another note, then… aaaarrrrgh :exclamation:

In the following example, my mouse is pointing to where I think the selection will go before I press the up/down/right/left arrow keys.

  • Navigation with arrow keys
    Daniel has explained before that the selection is graphical, i.e. whatever item is closest to the current selection is what will get selected next, but that doesn’t seem to work for me because sometimes it skips items and other times it selects what I don’t deem to be “closest,” counteracting what would be intuitive to me. Thoughts?
  1. How, when attempting to select a chord, the range automatically extends beyond the staff into the other staves, selecting those notes as well. How do I select a chord when one of the notes of the chord is selected, without selecting anything else?

Any constructive thoughts on these items will be greatly appreciated. :wink:
–π

Asking other people about the navigation behaviour won’t change it, Thiago. As I’ve explained to you, it’s graphical in nature, and it’s designed to allow you to select anything in the music by moving up, down, left, or right. When you move in a given direction, there is a kind of cone extending in that direction, and whatever item is closest and part of which falls inside the cone is going to be selected. This may appear to be closer to above or below than, say, to the right, but there has to be some deviation from the exact direction in which you’re moving or it would not be possible to ensure that every item can be selected.

There is not currently an equivalent to Sibelius’s “select more” feature but it is the kind of thing I expect we will add in future.

Sorry if you misunderstood me, dear Daniel—I am not advocating change here, especially on the short-term since I know you guys are so busy adding features and fixing issues; what I am hoping is that other Dorico users have insights about how they navigate through their scores that may be of value.

For example, I think being able to navigate through the notes without fear of them changing pitches is absolutely wonderful, but I myself may not have been able to come up with that idea, being so used to other applications, even if today it makes total sense! :slight_smile:

Thiago, I can confirm that I too find the navigation with the arrow keys absolutely counter-intuitive.

First: I highly appreciate the approach taken from DAWs like Logic, namely to be able to navigate around without changing anything, and to use modifier keys to move notes up, down, left and right.

But in write mode I would expect the selection to focus on the notes. In Sibelius there is the combination alt+arrow keys to navigate through parts of a note, like the stem. In Dorico I would prefer that normal arrow navigation would only select notes, and in combination with - say - option objects like hairpins and dynamics are also considered. More detailed stuff (like stems or accidentals) of cours should be only accessible in engrave mode.

At the moment, when I navigate through a staff with rests and a note with more than 5 leger lines, the note will be ignored. I at least would expect, that left/right would absolutely stay in the actual staff.

I also would very much like it if when I delete a selected note with backspace the rest that now fills the gap will be selected. At the moment after deleting anything I have to select something with the mouse, this is quite unconvenient.

When I have two notes connected with a glissando line sometimes the line will be the next selected object, then the next note, but it also may happen that after the line the selection jums randomly to a complete different part of the score.

I thing there is some room for improvement here.

I definitely agree that there is room for improvement in the behaviour of the program when it comes to keeping something selected after deleting things: this is certainly something we plan to improve.