System Track improvement

Hi Daniel,

I would like to suggest an improvement to the System Track.

It’s happened to me a couple of times that I want to delete a substantial amount of bars in the score, and I select through the System Track said number of bars, usually scrolling a fair amount to do so, only to find that when I’ve selected everything I have to scroll back all the way because the delete button is only on the left side. Since I tend to select things from left to right, and not much –if at all– from right to left, this is definitely a nag. This, of course, is only an issue when there’s enough bars that you have to scroll a lot to select them and then scroll again to delete them, and it’s not an issue when deleting bars in smaller proportions.

I guess this could be said also to affect the other way around. For example, if I wanted to select with the System Track from right to left and then select everything with the appropriate button on the System Track, I’d have to scroll back right to find said button. Although, this has happened to me far less frequently than the ‘delete case’.

In the short time I’ve used Dorico I’ve grown accustomed to the brilliant way in which everything is easy, fast and very practical, so I figured this could use a minor, but important, improvement.

That being said, I can’t say how happy I am to be doing all of my composing (including rough sketches) on Dorico. Can’t think of ever going back to Sibelius or anything else. I still use my vertical piano for improvisation and trying voicings and textures, but I think at least for me that’s something that will never get old.

Cheers,
Rodrigo

We didn’t want to put the delete button and the select button together at the same side of the system track’s selected region because we wanted to make it as unlikely as possible that you could delete something when you meant to select something, but we certainly had shorter selections in mind when we designed this interface element. Anthony and I will talk about what we might do about it.

I definitely agree that the current layout helps by making it harder to delete something by accident. Then again, I’m sure you’ll come up with an elegant and practical solution, as always :wink:

Not to overload your collection of key-codes, but could there be a key-code to delete the measures selected by the system track?

What about allowing the buttons to float within the system track and remain on the screen—say, at the edges—as you scroll?

Is there any reason not to be able to select then push the delete key?

Too easy! :blush:

  1. Keyshortcut “go to start of selection”
    or
  2. Keyshortcut “zoom to selection”

Both solutions may come handy in other situations too.

Just to keep the creativity going… :wink:

2 Likes

… or Alt+backspace
or Alt+delete