If you can afford the time, I would like to discuss the behaviour of the stationary cursor, under different settings, in conjunction with the lower zone editors, and other cases that you may think of. What behaviour do you find natural? Does something work in a manner you don’t expect?
I’ll go first.
- When Stationary Cursor is enabled, it wants to be in a specific place on the screen, so it runs there and then it scrolls the screen. This position (of the stationary cursor) might not be ideal if left or right zones are activated, and instictively one reaches for the scroll bar. But then… autocroll is suspended.
I think a better approach would be:
Allow the user to modify the position of the stationary cursor using the scroll bars, the limit being the currently visible “range” in the project window, under current zoom settings. For this “range”, autoscroll would NOT suspend instead it would move the stationary position to the left or to the right, the way to suspend autoscroll would be to scroll TOO FAR left, or right. This way one could set the cursor more to the left (so as to see more of what’s coming up), or to the right.
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Click on empty space to locate. This should work for both upper and lower zones when you enable link cursors, in my opinion. As would tool selection.
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I think exploring the possibility of a lower zone score editor of infinite length, SYNCED to the stationary cursor has its merits. To put it simply, we would have 1 staff (or two depending on the staff settings, e.g. piano) that scrolls together with the stationary cursor forever. (not like a page, where we continue underneath with a new system of staves after the page width has been reached).
I suspect that under extreme zoom settings there would be display problems, but it has advantages too.
What’s your experience?