This has been bugging me for a while. I spend a lot of time writing choral short scores (i.e. Soprano and Alto as two voices on one stave, ditto Tenor and Bass). I find the cursor keys the easiest way to navigate around the parts, as they move more or less logically between all four voices… except when two voices on the same stave are in unison. There are two (maybe two and a half) issues here;
- Visually there is no way to know which of the two voices is selected, as it’s only the notehead that’s highlighted. It would be cool to have a setting which also highlighted the stem (though obviously that wouldn’t work for semibreves/whole notes and longer).
- Much trickier, you can’t navigate directly from one voice to the other if they’re in unison with cursor keys alone - Dorico always selects (I think) the stem-up voice, and scrolling down will skip the lower voice entirely. This is probably by design because of issue 1, but it’s a real pain. The only way to select the lower voice with keys is to go back to a point where the voices aren’t in unison, cursor-down to the lower voice, then return to the point you want to edit. Otherwise you have to reach for the mouse and click the stem (and even that won’t work if the note doesn’t have a stem).
I really can’t think of a use case where I would want to skip the lower voice of a unison when navigating with cursor keys. Similarly I’m trying to think of a use case where I wouldn’t want to see visually which of two unison notes is the one selected.
So I guess this is an enhancement request - would it be possible (maybe through a setting rather than default behaviour) to scroll through voices, rather then pitches, and visually show which is selected by highlighting the stem as well as the notehead?
And that half-issue - if the option was there to navigate like this, then it would be good to have a setting to scroll in voice order even when (for example) the bass is temporarily above the tenor - doesn’t happen often but it does happen with good reason. That way, I would know that if I have the soprano selected, I can cursor-down three times and I’ll always select the bass.
Please let me know if I’ve missed something! I know I can reach for the mouse, or look at the bottom of the window to read which voice is selected, but if you’re used to cursor key navigation, both of those seriously interrupt your workflow!
Cheers,
Mark