I’m sometimes having trouble creating custom keyboard shortcuts. For instance, I just tried to assign the four main articulations (accent-staccato-marcato-tenuto) to keys F16-F19. For some reason, F16 works as expected, while the others only produce the well-known MacOS “meaningless-key-combination” sound. It works fine to put them into the shortcuts list in preferences - and they are still there, they just don’t work. I have had other similar problems with other key combinations. Is this a known issue?
By the way (and forgive me if this has been shed light on already), is there a way to export my personal shortcuts? And import them later in case an update should override them?
The last question is easy to answer: your customised shortcuts live in a file called keycommands_en.json (where those final two letters before the extension are the keyboard language chosen in the Key Commands page of Preferences), and you can safely back them up.
The first question is harder to answer: I’ll try those function keys on my full-size Mac keyboard when I get home tonight (if I remember, which I will try to do!) but there are certainly some keys that Dorico has problems with on some keyboard layouts. We avoid the function keys by default because of course for many years now they have by default done special things like changing the volume and display brightness etc. on Mac computers, but if you have the option in System Preferences set to make them work like regular keys, then they should in general work within Dorico.
Thank you Daniel. Its much appreciated.
It’s not only the F-keys I’ve had problems with. For example I tried to toggle grace note types with shift-ctrl-G, which didn’t work. Also in that case the key command was accepted in the preferences panel, but nevertheless didn’t work. If I remember correctly, I also experienced successfully assigning a command that later - after a restart- stopped working.
Has this phenomenon something to do with some international keyboard layouts not yet being fully supported? It sounds like a nightmare if every instance needs its own fix!
I suspect it is indeed some horror to do with international keyboard layouts. We cannot reasonably buy every language’s keyboard and debug every problem with them, alas, since it is difficult enough to do so for the nine languages in which Dorico is currently localised. Unfortunately we are somewhat at the mercy of the international keyboard support in the underlying Qt framework that we use, and although we can fix bugs in Qt, ideally we would be spending our time building features that are valuable to every user of every nationality rather than having to devote our very limited programming time to debugging problems with keyboards.
That’s not to say that we definitely could not or will not look into and hopefully fix this problem, since I recognise that of course it is a major impediment to you being able to customise the software to work as you want it to, but it’s difficult to make this our highest priority when there are so many features and fixes that would benefit a larger number of users waiting for us to work on them. Sorry.
This is absolutely understandable. Is there a way to bypass the trouble and set my keyboard to act like an English one “locally” - meaning that it only behaves like that when using Dorico? I don’t need the special Danish characters much when working with Dorico, but I do want them in other applications, so a global change of language wouldn’t be feasible.
There’s a language setting in the preferences panel, but it’s (as far as I remember - I’m not able to check right know) already set to English. I suppose it only applies to the supported languages, right?
The only way would be to go to the Input Sources tab of the Keyboard pane in System Preferences and add an English keyboard layout there, then choose ‘Show input menu in menu bar’, and switch to the little US or British flag in the menu bar when you want to use Dorico.
No, indeed not, since your customised shortcuts are presumably set to ‘Default’ language, which will be English if you’re running the software in English anyway.
More mysteries occur: One of my shortcuts is ctrl-1 for Break Beam (don’t ask why). It used to work as intended, but suddenly it didn’t. Instead it did the same as ctrl-Num1 (which is zoom to page width).
When I - for no apparent reason - changed my keyboard layout to English and back (!), it started working again…
By the way, changing keyboard layout does not in general solve the problems mentioned previously in the thread.
Sorry to bring this old thread back… I’m struggling with some shortcuts, and for instance shift-cmd-F2 is useless on my mac, while shift F2 or cmd-F2 will work flawlessly. Is there by any chance an explanation with the Qt framework? I’ve been tracking down every app in my mac and that shortcut is not used anywhere else.
Is that shortcut used at a system level? I was setting a few custom key commands at a system level the other day and was surprised to see a few of the combinations that are programmed for things like mission control or launcher. I never use those apps, but there were long key-strokes reserved for them. Deleting them there might solve the problem (if it’s indeed related).
I have disabled all Fn key shortcuts in the macOS preferences but the problem remains.
One strange thing that makes me think it’s a bug : if no shortcut is assigned to shift-cmd-F2, it acts as “add accents” in Dorico! If I use the combination for anything, then it does not do anything. Weird, right?
Shift+Cmd+F2 can be used on my (English) macOS installation - it’s used for Filter Upstem Voices within Notation Express. There are a LOT of Fn-key combinations that don’t seem to work, though.
Unfortunately there certainly are combinations that won’t work, especially on non-English keyboards, due to the way Qt handles the keys according to the characters they produce rather than their raw key codes. This area of the framework is, sadly, a bit of a mess.
Thanks Daniel! Good to know that the problem is not on my side. Indeed, Leo, it’s when I created the french version of your Notation express that I noticed that the combination did not work (in French. In English I tested it and this is why I’m surprised it does not work)
I’ll take some time to make sure my new combinations work flawlessly.