Elementary: drag one note to a different pitch?

I do, but (not trying to be argumentative here) personally feel like it’s splitting hairs at this point. Dorico is primarily a page layout program – designed to make sheet music. Engrave mode lets me move an object up/down/left/right and make it look right, sure. Write mode lets me decide what notes are part of my piece, and (IMHO) should more easily allow me to change those notes quickly. In the end, both modes are part of getting me to the final result: a finished visual score. That Engrave mode pertains to position/appearance and Write mode pertains to notes (etc.) seems like…well…I’m running out of analogies here…but bottom line, both components have to be done right in order to have a good finished score, so why are we splitting hairs about note changes being potentially dangerous while dragged changes made in Engrave mode are not? They both are.

I really feel like I have to take a step back from this thread, because I only came here to learn why I couldn’t grab a C and move it to a D, and that question’s been well answered now. I’m tiring of debating design philosophy, since I’m not an app designer, but am merely trying to provide feedback or advocate for potentially easier, more intuitive ways to do things from an end user perspective. The Dorico team can freely ignore my input, or maybe it’ll spur them to think of ways to make Dorico more intuitive in the future within their framework, whether or not it’s the way I recommended. But I assume it’s valuable to them to hear user feedback that I think the current behavior is not terribly intuitive.

If you created a word processor and the word processor didn’t allow me to change a “c” to a “d” without switching modes, I would be making the same point. The existence of a backspace key would not be considered dangerous; in fact it would probably be one of the primary ways a user might use to change a “c” to a “d”.

The word Program analogy is actually a quite good one, as Dorico‘s note input is essentially the same:

  • it has a caret
  • you best enter with the keyboard
  • backspace deletes the last note/letter entered.

You wouldn’t like to enter words by clicking on a virtual Keyboard, nor would you think it’s sensible to select a letter and change it from an „e“ to a „d“ by dragging it with the mouse.

It’s just that Dorico combines multiple approaches:

  • write mode with caret on is like a word processor
  • write mode with caret off is too, but when you would care about a higher level content (headers, lists, tables) instead of letter-content
  • engrave mode is like a DTP program (InDesign, Publisher etc) for final print layout.

All in one program!

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