Yes, that’s precisely the case in the situation I mentioned with the hairpin: it was across a page/system break. Still disorienting, although as I said, I understand the reasoning. Thanks.
Yesterday I was training one of my students, giving them an introduction to Dorico. As I was zooming in and out (in galley view), the behavior was consistently unpredictable. The screen would jump back and forth to different places in the score. Dorico’s strengths overcame this minor disorientation, but it certainly throws me.
I think we’re in danger of getting several things mixed up here. There are three things you’re now talking about.
First: what gets selected when you use the arrow keys.
Second: what stays in view when you zoom in and out.
Third: how Dorico moves the score automatically when the selection changes.
I don’t believe the first two of these things are relevant to this thread and to the issues Craig is describing, which is what I really want to understand. So if you have any observations about what gets selected when you use the arrow keys, or what ends up in view when you zoom in or out, then please don’t post them here. You don’t, in fact, need to post them at all, because those problems are well-understood and are simply waiting for us to have sufficient time to work on them.
Got it. Yes, I already had dropped #1, but I was mistakenly thinking zoom behavior was on point with this discussion. Sorry to keep beating this thread!
That is probably true. I don’t use the arrow keys for selecting very much because of their, shall we say, unconventional behavior. However, I have a vague feeling that I have observed some of the #3 pattern when using the arrow keys. I will pay more attention to that. It is possible that part of what I have described as unexpected vertical movement was actually the result of the arrow keys jumping to something completely out of view. If so, that should be easy to produce an example. Moreover, as you say, an example is probably not needed because you already understand the arrow key issue.
I would certainly benefit from a not moving screen. I work during playback, and also write notes without them in the view, while looking at reference parts in another vertical position. It could be managed with multiple windows, but having an option would be nice. 3 options - standard focusing, only during note entry and playback (no pasting and selection change of focus), no change of focus.
One particular case of this is when moving from score to part. I would expect Dorico to focus on a selected note or passage but it returns to the beginning of the score/part.
I saw one minor case of the unexpected jumping this evening. I would put this in the category of “Probably working as designed, still a little confusing, and has unnecessary complications.”
The case is a single note selected in flow 2. I had scrolled back to the beginning of flow 1. I pressed 5 with the intention of entering notes. As soon as I hit the 5, the window jumped to the selected note.
I didn’'t think I was in note entry mode, but maybe I was. I wasn’t even aware I had a note selected – because it wasn’t in the visible window. This is one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations. It doesn’t make any sense for the program to act on rhythm changes for notes that are outside the visible window. But it doesn’t make sense to me for the program to jump because if you are intending to enter or change notes, surely you intend to operate on the notes you can see, not notes somewhere in the score.
This “out of scope” thing might account for many of the situations discussed in this thread. While I concede there is an argument for horizontal jumping in this case, there was also vertical jumping that was entirely unnecessary. That adds to the disorientation factor because not only do you have to regain you bearings about which measure is active, you also have to reconnect with the staff you were working on, which now is in an entirely different vertical position on the window.
I understand the motivation for horizontal jumping, but I’d suggest a far better solution would be to beep whenever the user is trying to do an operation on objects that are entirely out of the visible window – and to take no other action. A more elegant (and complicated) solution would be to animate the jump so the user can easily see the movement as a glide rather than an abrupt jump.
Certainly in this case, Craig, if you had the note selected but you were not in note input mode, then hitting 5 would have edited the duration of the selected note to an eighth, and because you had edited the note, it was brought into view.
My suggestion in that instance would be to try to hold the vertical position constant if at all possible. That would cut the disorientation factor in half.
I find the vertical shift happens a lot, but not consistently. For example, it can happen when stopping the playback using the P key (and under many other conditions, I think.) I assume there could be a single bit of code whose job is to try to keep the active objects in the visible window. I can well imagine a programmer thinking it would be welcome to try to really center things on both X and Y. Personally, I find the Y shifts very annoying. I probably scrolled to the current vertical position for a reason. If that moves on me, I have to stop to figure out what instruments I am looking at.
In general this is of course what Dorico does: it tries to maintain the same vertical position if possible when moving the score. Again, I think a specific example (e.g. a screen recording of the whole screen) would help.
No question. Each time it happens, I try to recreate the steps and so far I can’t get it to do the same thing twice in a row. It seems highly intermittent.
I don’t suppose this is terribly helpful, but I have noticed this jumping behavior happens quite a lot at the END of a play sequence. That is, I have selected a single note, then hit “P”. I let the playback go for a dozen measures or so – beyond the point where it has to auto-scroll to keep up with the music. Then if I hit “P” to stop the playback, it may not move at all, or it may jump in a way that appears random. Again, this jumping almost always includes a vertical shift, even though I have done nothing to rearrange the placement of objects that might trigger a vertical shift.
This happens perhaps one out of 10 times when I do the “P” thing. I have not figured any way to reproduce it, and I have not yet figured out any consistency to WHERE it jumps to. I emphasize the jump happens immediately as I press the ending “P”. There is no mouse activity and no editing underway at that point.
Steve, although I don’t know why the caret isn’t appearing at the start of the bar that is brought into view, that is what I would expect to happen at the moment: see this earlier thread.
Nothing new to report here, unfortunately. The galley view is still jumping around like crazy and I can’t find any regular pattern to it. One of those random jumps happens about every two minutes when I am working busily. The most aggravating part is the vertical shifting because there is absolutely nothing that should be causing that.
Has anybody else picked up any patterns? To me, it seems like it can happen just about any time during just about any operation.
I never notice anything like this on any other program. I use several DAWs on this computer, Finale, and serious other studio tools.
I might get a new mouse just for the heck of it.
I should also note that one of the times I get a wild jump is when hitting “P” on the keyboard to end a playback. In those cases, I’m not even touching the mouse.
I’m wondering if you might have some kind of macro program installed? Something that types a certain pattern of letters whenever you press a certain key or key combination? Perhaps pressing a single key is actually triggering a macro that is in turn pressing several keys in a certain sequence, causing these jumps. It looks like MacOS has built in macros and there are also additional addon programs like Keyboard Maestro etc. which can be used to record macros and trigger certain actions when a key or key combination is pressed (ex. typing ‘omw’ can get turned into ‘on my way’, things like that). There is also something called “Automator” built in that can do similar things. Maybe you had once set up something like that to automate things in a certain program, and it is unintentionally triggering things inside Dorico?
No. Nothing like that, as far as I know. It is vanilla Windows 10. I just had to rebuild the system from the ground up about 3 months ago, so the software is rather fresh.
Maybe I’ll try to rig up some software to make a video of my entire editing session, then when it happens I could at least document the behavior. I think I can do that with icecream.