I’m loving Dorico 3.1, and generally I love its UI. But occasionally, I run into a situation where I feel like the UI is getting in my way because it’s unclear or awkward. Here are some ideas for quality-of-life improvements to elicit hidden information and to make certain features more convenient:
Clarity
- Show rhythmic columns through all staves while holding Alt (for using Alt-click to copy/paste or Alt-arrows to move/lengthen by grid)
- Highlight on mouseover what would be selected on click (especially when over a beam/stem/measure)
- Indicate if a property in the Properties panel differs between layouts (or between score and at least one part)
- Indicate if an accidental’s logical spelling is overridden in part
- Indicate whether an element such as a dynamic only affects a single voice (like voice colors)
- Indicate if instrument is modified from Dorico definition (i.e. via MusicXML import)
- Indicate direction of off-screen linked elements in layout while linkable element is selected (perhaps also indicate total number of linked elements)
Ease of use
- Add a toggle for showing empty staves (like the existing condensing/transposing/consolidating toggles)
- Allow moving and copying/pasting breaks and condensing changes in Engrave mode
- Add option to select only one item below mouse on click (or at least do not select dissimilar items)
- Add an option to disallow horizontal linking of dynamics/slurs/etc.
- Alt-click a property to propagate it across all layouts (perhaps even upon modification)