I’m wondering if this is the normal behavior or if I accidentally changed something from my configuration… or if it’s an unintended behavior.
If I select a chord (selecting all notes), then I press the up arrow key, the result is that the lowest note in chord is selected (the complete opposite of what should happen). The same is true for the down key–it selects the highest note in chord.
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The Up arrow cycles up through the stack so, it starts at the lowest note.
The Down arrow cycles down through the stack so starts on the highest note.
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I always use the up/down arrows to select a note in a chord - too fiddly to select the correct now without zooming in - but I had not noticed this specific way of operating. Thanks for the clarification!
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Thank you Craig for your answer! Now I understand the logic behind it.
A little unintuitive in my perspective–not criticizing here, just stating my opinion. If I have a five-notes-chord and I want to select the middle note, my intuition tells me: select either extreme (lower or higher) and THEN move towards the middle. In this case, both approaches work (i.e., thinking about cycling through the stack or what I just described before). But if I want to select the second to lowest or second to highest, that’s where I don’t see myself thinking about cycling. I think: I need to select the second to highest, so the shortest route is to select the highest (up arrow) and then move down one note (down arrow).
Maybe I’ve grown familiar to the way text navigation in computers work. If I’ve just written a seven letter word and need to correct its second letter, instead of pressing six times the left arrow, I press one key to skip to the beginning, and then press the right arrow. Same applies to paragraphs, and in both directions.
Am I the only one with this pet peeve?
You are not the only one. This is again logical but not sensible, and it really bugs me.
The expected behaviour is: With multiple vertical notes selected, ↑⃣ reduces the selection to just the top note, and ↓⃣ to the bottom note. (As I edit this post, I realize my expectation comes mainly from Sibelius, where I know the Alt-arrow key behavior was carefully thought through.)
For example, with a chord selected, if I want just the 2nd note from the top, I would expect to hit ↑⃣↓⃣ – not ↓⃣↓⃣. Dorico’s current behaviour with multiple notes selected feels like ↑⃣ selects down and ↓⃣ selects up.
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That’s just the words I was searching for! Thank you Mark. It’s logical. Definitely logical; no argument there. That’s why I don’t want to be pretentious and assume everyone should have the same train of thought as I do.
I needed to know if I was the only one feeling this counter-intuitive. Maybe there are more of us not seeing this as sensible. Thanks again Mark.
I have to clarify I AM also considering the possibility that it’s just an inherited bad habit… I have not discarded that. But thinking again of word processors and just general text writing in computers, written letters are not addressed as stacks (even though they ARE; they are “horizontal” stacks) when editing. They are addressed as items in visual space. I move through text using the arrows, independently of the stacks they are, just using the “visual space intuition”.