I am having frequent difficulties selecting items with the mouse when they are close together. In the following example, I select the 5 so that it is highlighted.
But if after carefully placing the cursor exactly on the selected item, I try to move it with the mouse, this inadvertently selects the neighboring pedal mark:
The same thing often happens in selecting the end of a slur that is near a stem or beam. It’s like there is too great a zone of selection around the cursor. Perhaps there is a setting to make this finer?
This issue does not arise if the item is moved with the arrow keys.
A solution of a kind, but I would call it more of a work-around. One should be able to move any object with the mouse when necessary.
Another work-around would be to raise the zoom to 300% or greater.
Something similar happens in selecting a note from a chord at certain zoom settings. One must be very careful to place the cursor on the far edge of a notehead or the entire chord is selected. But this has been discussed already.
Dorico would know by calculating what’s the nearest object from the mouse input location. Trying to select some notes of a chord constituent of 3 or more notes with an interval of a 3rd or less is a pain in the butt, if not zoomed in. Sibelius doesn’t have this problem at all, it is handled pretty well.
It‘s not that the boundaries of objects overlap so much; it’s that the active area of the mouse pointer that selects things is slightly “fat”. This is a design choice, and it explains why we can select multiple objects with one click, and be more specific when zoomed in.
The fact. that zooming overcomes this problem would bear that out. I never ran into this issue in Finale. A option to narrow the zone around the cursor would be helpful, if that is indeed what is going on.
There is a “magical” shortcut that enables to select objects that are positioned closely, or even overlapping, or single notes of a chord, or signposts, even if you are zoomed out:
shift+alt and then click with the mouse,
if you click more times (always with shift+alt pressed) Dorico will circle the selections that are in proximity of the mouse (every click he selects something else) , so you are able to select what you want.
As Christian just explained, cycle clicking alt-shift-click over the object you want to select and then only use the keyboard once it’s selected is the only workflow I’ve found efficient with Dorico. Use the tab to select different holds (for slurs or ties), arrows (with alt, shift, alt+shift, alt+shift+ctrl modifiers) and you’re done.
Don’t waste your time trying anything else, unless @dspreadbury tells us something new. My 2c.
I must be missing something. Option-Shift clicking an object is doing nothing more than clicking it.
I was hoping that this command might help me with another selection problem. When I try to select a complete short slur to move as a whole, invariably I wind up selecting one of the control points. Then I have to go back and find a spot on the slur to select that isn’t a control point, which is sometimes not easy if it is a very short slur. Or I can lasso it trying to avoid anything else in the way. It would be great to know a command that allows one to select a whole slur no matter where one clicks on it.
Sounds like you are working in Engrave mode? Move slurs with alt-left/right in WRITE mode. (Most of your work should be done in Write mode. Engrave is only really needed for tweaking at the end of your workflow)
After the click (in your case to select a small slur in Engrave mode), and if it happens that a control point is selected, another “magical” shortcut is the tabulator key, the one that looks like this: ⇥
Clicking it, Dorico will circle and jump to the next control point on the right, and after the last control point, he deselects all control points. with a further click.
When no control point is selected, you can then move the whole slur with shift+alt and the arrows.
Thanks, Christian_R. That is a command I should be able to deal with. However, I think that it would be better if there were an option such as I described,
Janus, one can move a slur as a whole vertically in Engrave Mode by clicking on a spot on the slur that is not a control point and dragging… The problem is finding that spot in a short slur where the control points are very close together and without knowing where they actually are before one clicks… And one can move the slur in any direction by option-clicking such a spot and dragging.
One can also move a slur vertically by option-clicking and using the arrow keys.
What one cannot do is move a slur horizontally by using the arrow keys in Engrave Mode. This was the subject of recent thread.
