musescore
Thoughts on making palette insertion better
Your idea
To make the insertion of palette items more quick I suggest:
- Possibility to define shortcut to highlight directly the palette elements.
- Once the palettes are highlighted and navigable, when a specific palette is selected, elements should be given a specific key as a shortcut, without having to navigate the palette with arrow keys. See image.
Problem to be solved
A the present moment, inserting elements from the palettes very time-waisting: you need to either a) use the mouse or b) navigate UI elements with TAB, highlight the palette or navigate through palettes with arrow keys and then navigate through the elements of the palette with the arrow keys again; if the element is the last of the list, it will tale much time.
With a better way to insert palette items, the workflow will improve tremendously.
Prior art
No response
Additional context
No response
Checklist
- [X] This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
- [X] I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests
In addition, with the purpose of keeping the workflow keyboard-dependent (for large scores is important), there could also be something like a search box that hovers over the score and is opened through a shortcut and from which the user could search the palette element. The element will be presented as a small image and with enter (or few arrow keystrokes) it could be inserted.
Something like this (forgive my terrible skills as a graphic designer – I am not one!):
And this has to de feasible without leaving the note input state, in this concept is not shown.
I am a huge fan of this idea, (although a slur is a bad example because there's the 'S' shortcut :P). There's this years Google Summer of Code 'Dynamics Popup' project (read here: https://musescore.org/en/user/5201410/blog/2024/05/28/gsoc-2024-dynamics-popup) that is very close to this, so hopefully the code minions can find ways to implement this design for other palettes :)
A problem with shortcuts is that there is only a limited number of keys, so it would be hardly possible to define a consistent and comprehensive set of shortcuts for all frequently used items. Therefore I think something like an in-score search field is a more viable plan. Incidentally, I made a pretty specific design for something like that recently; perhaps I will be able to present that soon.
There's already a Ctrl+F9 (macOS: Cmd+F9) shortcut to go straight to the Palette search box. It's not quite the same as an in-score search field, but serves the same purpose.
Dorico has their popover system where you can type what you want and it gets inserted, which seems similar.
What about hotkey chord? Like pressing s and r together for slur, and p and m together for palm mutes.
Or use fake chord keys like VS Code, which is actually a few keys in sequence.
And the context awareness of VS Code hotkeys seems to be a good design.
