Selection and deselection

Dorico
1

Hi all,

New to the forum but I’ve been using (and enjoying) Dorico for nearly three years now (having finally got fed up of Av*d!) and always on the lookout for ways to optimise my workflow. I’m a keyboard user who doesn’t like reaching for the mouse too often, and I’m wondering if other users have any workarounds for the following “selection” issues?

  • This one feels like a bug; say I have identical rhythms in adjacent parts, and I select a short passage in the lower part. If I hit cursor-up, it will select the first note of the equivalent passage, but if I’m moving downward it selects the last note. I’m often doing this to copy a passage from one part to another, and having it consistently jump to the start so I can hit ctrl-V straight away would be really helpful.
  • If instead of copying I delete a selection (i.e. with the Del key), as far as I can tell the first (now empty) bar is selected, unless there are notes in the previous bar, in which case the last note in the previous bar is selected. Does anyone have use cases for the latter behaviour?
  • If instead of deleting I ctrl-X to cut (and paste somewhere else), where is the selection supposed to move to? It seems to jump to a random position in a completely different part, though it doesn’t show until you hit a cursor key. Is there a logic to it?
  • My workflow when adding slurs is simply to select a phrase and hit S. If I hit cursor-R it will then jump to the note after my original selection unless there are already slurs further on in the part, in which case it will jump to the next slur. Is there a way of turning that behaviour off, so it always defaults to note-selection?
  • Finally, is there a way to exclude note selections from the Undo-Redo chain? If I make some change, navigate around with the cursor keys, then realise I need to undo the change I made, I have to “undo” every single cursor move, and watch the screen like a hawk for my change to undo so I don’t go too far back. Most editor-style programs will only put actual changes in the chain, and while I can see the case for sometimes undoing/redoing selections too, it would be useful to have this switchable somehow.

Mark

2

Oh, and as someone who writes choral music 90% of the time, a setting to always select lyrics along with their notes would be amazing - I’ve lost count of the times I delete notes only to end up with zombie lyrics which you can only select with the mouse!

3

When I have a note selected and press SHIFT+Right Arrow, that key-combination adds subsequent notes and their lyrics (and ornaments and articulations) to the selection.

4

That’s true - all the more reason why it’s odd that selecting a single note doesn’t select its lyric. Though once again, maybe there’s a use case where that’s useful.

5

If you select notes and lyrics together, you can’t access their properties in the panel at the bottom. Properties only show that are common to all selected items.

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