Currently, when using the properties panel at the bottom of Dorico’s window, you need to first activate the property by clicking on the little switch, then you need to click on one of the option “buttons” to select the applicable option. For example, to change the slur curvature after adding a slur to the score, you need to make 2 mouse clicks: first on the activation switch, then on the selection button itself. It would be nice if this could be accomplished with one mouse click, by simply clicking on the option selection button, which would also automatically activate the property switch. Similarly, clicking in a text field such as “Custom scale” should enable that property and allow its value to be typed directly and immediately, without the need to do this in 2 steps. This would make the interface a lot more streamlined and intuitive, and make the properties panel fast and easy to use!
As an analogy, in an operating system printing dialog, the default option is generally to print the entire document, so the “print all pages” radio-button option is set by default when the dialog opens. However, if the user clicks in the fields below that option and sets a specific page range to be printed, the “print specific page range” radio-button option is automatically selected, instead. (The user does not have to make an extra redundant click to select that option before typing the page range.)
Anyway - in spite of this minor annoyance, Dorico is a joy to work with! Looking forward to the next update!
This has come up quite a bit on the forum, though I can’t find a link to one of the threads at the moment. Basically, there are some very strong opinions among users about this, but the current behavior is not likely to change.
Maybe someone else can link to one of the threads.
maybe the dorico team could eventually consider making it an interface option in the global preferences?? That way strong opinions on both sides of the aisle could set up their workspace in whatever way works best with their personal workflow… ?? Just a suggestion…
The point is that this is not an interface question; the interface reflects a structural fact of the coding which affects the entire program.
That is not to say it can never change, only that it would likely wait till the Team (or the successors after this team all retire) decides to restructure the underlying code across the board years down the road. A more likely situation is that Lua scripting, when the back end of the program is fixed enough to allow the Team to release entry points, will allow plug-in developers a chance to create scripted shortcuts to do what some folks want.