I often use Shift-Right/Left to extend note selection. Many times when selecting notes in a busy passage that way, I will overshoot and select one more than I meant to. My instinct from text editors is to press Shift-, which Dorico doesn’t map for that.
Until today, I hadn’t figured out a way to deselect that one note rather than cursing, starting over, and pressing the Right arrow caaarrreeefffuuullly.
The answer is (undo) Ctrl-Z. That’s unexpected, but Dorico seems very consistent adding minute selections to the Undo stack, so it makes internal sense.
The other discovery was to refine a large selection by selecting a larger region, e.g., by clicking in a bar to select its notes, and then control-clicking the notes you don’t want. I would like to be able to do this with the keyboard somehow. If anyone reading this knows how to do that, please chime in.
You can’t deselect notes with the keyboard alone, I’m afraid. I’m not sure how we could make that possible, really: there would need to be some way of navigating the focus around among the selected items without changing the selection and then deselecting them.
I agree with Daniel. I think, that another kind of selecting/deselecting, which would it make possible to deselect something by keyboard navigation, would increase the complexity of key navigation enormously. Coming from Mac I am totally pleased with the interface of Dorico (and other professional software products) cause it allows to work with the way I am used to without asking the manual for basic commands.
Hmmm, I wasn’t looking for something you’d have to find in a manual. I was looking for a feature that is so ubiquitous I looked in the manual to try to determine why it wasn’t working for me.
If you double-click on a word in this paragraph, the whole word will get selected. [Think of that as the large selection in my OP, and the string of characters in the word as the notes in the large selection.] Now hold down the Shift key and press the left arrow. The right-most character will be deselected, and you can keep going to deselect its neighbor. I have that muscle memory from more than 30 years of working with text editors of all levels of complexity, cells in spreadsheets, DAWs, on and on. The UI I’m describing may not be quite as common as Cmd-C, Cmd-V but it comes close.
The focus is already there at the end, as far as I can tell. That is, if I click in a bar to select all its notes, I can Shift-Right to extend the selection to the right. It would be nice to be able to deselect from the right as well.
jsharer, that wasn’t what your previous request sounded like: it sounded like you wanted to be able to arbitrarily deselect notes from within the bar selection, rather than reduce it from either end. Dorico interprets Shift+left and right as always extending the selection, and this is unlikely to change in the near future, at any rate.
I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear. I agree that somehow deselecting arbitrary notes with the keyboard would be very fiddly and of questionable value. Perhaps my request sounded like I was looking for that because Ctrl-clicking does let you deselect arbitrary notes, which is cool. It’s not so nice as a keyboard would be for starting with a large selection and reducing it by a note or two from the end.
Even if you want to retain Shift-Left as you have it, can you see value in reducing the selection at the area of focus with some other key combination? I’m not sure if you have customer telemetry data that would show how often people do such a thing.