Popover drop list showing all available options?

Doesn’t seem like this is possible but it would be helpful to get all possible completions by hitting, say the TAB key, any thoughts? The auto complete is quite nice, this would just be one step further.

The problem is that Tab advances the popover to the next downbeat for several types of input.

How about spacebar? Even easier and a common enough paradigm, hit spacebar and it does a dropdown list which takes focus, and scroll wheel scrolls it. They’re using Qt which supports that IIRC.

How would you then write “con sord.” into the popover, for instance?

Scroll boxes with hundreds of entries are pretty useless.

Normally what you do in a UI, and most toolkits support it, is to also have search. Hit spacebar, drop list, the list jogs your memory, if it’s large then a first letter gets you in the ballpark then you can zero in. Besides which huge lists aren’t useless in my experience, modern computers are fast enough and scrolls are good enough you can move around really quickly.

The one I trip on is tempo, I’m more used to seeing a tempo and knowing what it is but for some reason have some trouble going the other way. A drop down list would jog the memory just fine I think.

I think it would work that you could hit space, "flick-scroll’ down to cXXXXXX and then just click the list entry, or you type c, it drops a list of all the cXYZ’s and you pick it that way.

Actually I’m finding I like to write at Dorico, so really I think my workflow would be that I want to see the whole list so I can go shopping for what the best choice is. Faster than pulling out a music dictionary and poking around.

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I don’t really care what comes up by way of popover as long as I’m not prevented from typing what I want and hitting enter. I don’t want to be forced to hit arrow keys or grab a mouse. It slows everything down.

I would summarise what you are saying is “big scroll lists are OK, so long as you use shortcuts to turn them into short scroll lists”.

Like pianoleo, I just type what I want into popovers. I can’t imagine ever “wanting to see the whole list so I can go shopping”. But I have seen scores produced by composers who apparently work like that - and it’s usually pretty obvious.

If you’re not always sure what you want, and the visual prompt is therefore helpful, the panel alternative to the popover (where tempos are listed in different categories, as are all the other notations) might be the “easy answer” in that situation? Some popovers already have suggestion drop-downs, tempo included, but that doesn’t prevent you ignoring the suggestions and just entering anything you like (although most popovers require if not exact entries, specific combinations of letters/characters to produce the right result).

Or you could summarize it as “follow the same paradigm used in a thousand other programs”. My day job is as a software engineer and yes this is common.

Like pianoleo, I just type what I want into popovers. I can’t imagine ever “wanting to see the whole list so I can go shopping”. But I have seen scores produced by composers who apparently work like that - and it’s usually pretty obvious.

Summarized as “I’m commenting on a topic I don’t care about and getting a little snippy about it.” Not trying to start a flame war but it’s just an idea, and I was looking for feedback as Dorico is inconsistent in how it handles popovers. Also students are a major segment of Dorico users and the future growth of the platform so giving them a hand wouldn’t hurt, would it?

Panels require more clicking and are model usually, so best to keep that for configuration and other major things. FWIW I think the drop down list as described is a very common approach to data entry.

I’m pretty sure the panels Lillie is talking about are not modal; they are extensions of the strip on the right side of the screen.

I agree that making the syntax for popovers more discoverable is something that we should devote some more time and energy to in the future, and we have some ideas about how to do that. Watch this space for future versions.

Oh i can’t wait for that Daniel.
And as always it will be better than anyone could imagine - which leaves the question of how do you even come up with these solutions?

We listen to what our users say, then we think really hard :slight_smile:

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