Regarding shortcuts

Dorico
1

Good morning!

I am aware of that it is possible to create one’s own customized shortcuts, and I have done that a lot. However I would like to suggest something which would be applicable for Windows users at least, with OSX I am not so sure.

Please consider making more use of the alt+key shortcuts. For instance, when I in write mode do alt+r to open the write menu, only three of the commands have an underlined letter. And further on - when in a dialogue box like for instance the transposition, there is no way at all to choose a transposition with keyboard shortcuts. Please provide alt+key shortcuts in dialogue boxes as well, or at least some other way of using the keyboard. As a matter of fact Dorico seems to be quite mouse intensive. Also, when it comes to creating scripts with external scripting programs, one easy way to achieve the results is to be able to emulate keystrokes so a system like this would help that too.

A use case: in a project with 15 flows, I want to transpose each one one major second down to the key below. I have to select flow 1, open the transpose dialogue (yes, I set up a shortcut!), and click “down”, select “second”, then I can hit tab twice and enter. Multiply by 15. With a way to do this with keyboard only (or indeed, select all flows at the same time!) it would be so much smoother.

Thanks,
LAE

2

You can change almost everything using the “standard” shortcuts to navigate dialogs. For example

  • when you have tabbed to “Unison”, pressing Enter opens the menu to select the required interval and you can then select from that menu with the keyboard.
  • Pressing up/down arrow in the “number of octaves” control changes the number.
  • The space bar toggles the check boxes on and off.
  • etc…

The only thing you can’t do with the keyboard (or at least, I haven’t found a way) is to toggle the first two controls, “Transpose by” and “Direction”. That seems like an omission.

I would guess that when the scripting language gets better supported, it will be possible to do things like record the user actions to set up the dialog the way you want, and then replay them.

The problem with “transposing 15 flows” seems to be that you can select the notes in several flows at once (or at least, they appear to be selected, i.e. they are all colored orange) but the Transpose dialog only works on one of the flows.

3

Thanks Rob,

I did not think of that, that can be useful.