night - a program that enhances Cubase/Nuendo 12 with new hotkeys & functionality

Hey,

I made a program that adds some useful hotkeys and functionality that was missing for me in Cubase.

It’s built for Cubase/Nuendo 12, some of the stuff it provides:

  • Vertical zooming/track resizing and other scroll keybinds
  • A quick way to reveal automation lanes
  • Context-based keyboard shortcuts for managing tracks/inserts/sends
  • Ability to colorize projects with colors files that you can create outside of Cubase

The goal here is to kinda throw night out there rather than present it as software that’s gonna be very maintained or grow over time.

I tried keeping night as unopinionated and non-intrusive as possible, so that people can play with it and see if it benefits them in any way, and if so - maybe even modify it to their needs. The parts in code you’d wanna change are probably relatively easy to work with given that you are somewhat familiar with AutoHotKey and coding in general.

Hopefully this is useful to anyone!

3 Likes

Downloading now. Great project @matanm – Thank you!

Seems like a nice piece of work, but I don’t know if I can remember all those new hotkeys in addition to those in Cubase that I have already trouble memorizing :smile:
Never looked at AHK, but it definitely seems interesting!

Understandable, but you don’t actually have to use all of them - they don’t override any of your current hotkeys and most of them are only active when you right-click something.

The whole right-click hotkeys thing started because I wanted a hotkey to toggle used automation lanes for tracks which to my knowledge you can’t do in macros/PLE. What you can do is determine whether automation lanes are shown for a track through the right-click menu items (a track with automation shown will have a “Hide Automation” menu item), so I figured I’d do that and then run the appropriate key command (hide/show).

I took this idea a bit further and made it so Space either toggles automation lanes or folder tracks when you right-click a folder track. That one alone is super useful. Insert/send hotkeys are useful too. So yeah even if you don’t use all of them having at least these can be nice.

I added all the other hotkeys because they provide a nice benefit compared to global ones: you can use 1 hotkey for multiple actions based on what you right-clicked - track/midi note/audio part… You have the whole keyboard free so hotkeys can match their actions (e = enable, c = colorize, g = glue), which makes them easier to remember. Also, you can have most hotkeys on the left side of the keyboard which makes them more ergonomic to use.