I’m working on a piece with two clarinet players, each holding a clarinet in A and one in Bb. When I press shift-down to enter on multiple staves, it selects both instruments held by the first player rather than moving on to the second player. Unless you know some more accompliched clarinet players than I do, that seems a little pointless. Is it possible to enter music for both players at once, or do I have to go back to cut-and-paste?
Currently, your options would be cut-and-paste as you say, or a bit more work would be to rearrange the instruments in Setup mode so that one is the lowest for the top player and the other is the highest for the bottom player, so they are adjacent to one another. The latter would not be very satisfying so I can’t recommend it unless you have long stretches of the same instruments.
Until something like “Display only Selected Staves” is implemented in Dorico, I don’t see being able to input on non-adjacent instruments happening anytime soon because the visual concerns would quickly become tremendous.
I think it makes some sense that when doing multi-staff caret entry if you select one instrument a player is holding, it should ignore the other instrument(s) the same player is holding since as a general workflow it’d be quite out of the ordinary to need a player playing multiple instruments at once (outside of percussion of course, but that’s why we have Percussion grids). The problem with that is it still doesn’t necessarily solve your problem — if you select Clarinet 1 in B♭, Dorico could presume you don’t also need to add coincident notes in Clarinet 1 in A, but it can’t know whether you need Clarinet 2 in B♭ or in A. It could guess, but that’s probably a bad idea.
digitig, if you input in page view rather than galley view then you can input onto the active instruments held by each player when you extend the caret with Shift+up/down.