So Dorico is designed to be intuitive, until it is completely opaque. There is absolutely no way on planet Earth that anyone wanting to insert a two-bar repeat would think to type "Shift-R, %2,2.” How is that considered a normal part of a modern interface?
But anyway it is kind of neat to have secret codes like this.
What other secret codes are there in Dorico?
People coming up to tell you that this is completely normal for a pro-application, much more efficient and it’s up to you to just learn all these codes in 3… 2… 1…
HI Cantoryakov,
I wouldn’t call them cheat codes, they’re shortcuts. Rather than have to to type in 'repeat last two bars, group in 2" they’ve made it quicker and substantially less prone to error. This is one of those occasions where it really does pay to read the manual - these are examples of just a few of the popover entries for repeats.
Dear cantoryakov,
You will find lots of “secret cheat codes” in the documents that deal with popover entries (which are not secret…)
Hope this helps!
More than happy to oblige on the way-more-efficient front…
Here is the documentation page. Bookmark it for future reference, and for today’s purposes ignore the manuals and skip straight to the Popovers in Dorico document.
Intuitive doesn’t mean you were born knowing how it works: it means that everything operates in a consistent and similar way. Once you’ve learnt that Shift - something adds an object to the score, you know that Shift -something else adds something else to score. You know that all the Shift things bring up a popover.
Finale has what it calls ‘metatools’, which are just keypresses to add various objects to the score. You have to learn that Bass Clef is 4 and Alto clef is 2. You have to learn that dynamics are 1 to 9. Tenuto is E. (?)
Many of Dorico’s popover commands don’t require any learning. I can type the actual letters of dynamics. For clefs, I can type existing names, like ‘bass’ or ‘f’, and for the alto clef ‘alto’ or ‘c3’. Most popover use real words, chord names, or obvious mnemonics.
But if that’s too arcane, you can alternatively select them from the side panel.
you can’t call something a shortcut if it is the ONLY way to do something. but anyway i do like Dorico. thanks for your help.
The popover isn’t the only way to group repeat bars, though. You can insert a bar repeat section from the Bars and Barlines section of the right panel, then use the properties in the bottom panel to group it the way you want. The popover’s quicker, of course, hence David’s term “shortcut”.
OHHHHHH i didn’t see that possibility! ok then totally cool. the help file i found didn’t mention anything about that bottom panel. i found the bottom panel! cool!