musescore
"Hide All" option in the Layout panel
Your idea
I'd love to have a "hide all" button in the Layout panel. When working on an orchestral score, sometimes I need to edit one instrument through the whole thing (e.g. adding slurs to flute parts). It would be lovely to be able to "hide all" and then just un-hide the instrument of interest.
Problem to be solved
Tedious clicking of "hide" on each individual instrument in a score with many instruments.
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
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this is what generating the parts (from the Parts window) does already.
It's not quite that simple. I don't want to edit a single part. I want to edit an arbitrary selection of parts. For example, Flute 1, Oboe 1, and Clarinet 1, together. I'd like to hit "Hide All" in the Layout pane and then just toggle those three instruments to visibility. It's different from the Parts, which as I understand it are solo instruments or set groupings (like winds).
The Parts facility lets you unhide whatever instruments you like, so yes, you can create a new part which will be empty and then easily unhide whatever instrument you like. Or take your flute 1 part and unhide oboe 1 & clarinet 1. Either way, your score remains as it was which makes this a simpler method of achieving the result, and better still, you can keep this part around for further editing later as well if you like without having to redo that setup.
That said, if you prefer to work directlyu with the score and hide and unhide things every time you wish to edit a different instrument or collection of them, simply select all in the Layout panel and then you can hide or unhide them all in a single click.
Ahh. CTRL-A to select all (there is no "select all" button); click the "hide" button on one, and they all hide. That works, except one key problem, which led me to thinking there should be a dedicated "hide all" rather than "hide all these things I've selected one-by-one which hangs my computer": See attached.
It DOES work, eventually, if MuseScore Studio doesn't crash, but it's highly non-optimal, at least on my machine. Not sure it's a bug, it may just be I need a much beefier computer.
And yes, I'd much rather do this than deal with the Parts facility as you suggest. I'm just interested in hiding any number of instruments on the score that I choose, often almost all of them. And then un-hiding all of them again. Repeat, rinse.
But feel free to close this, or ask me to, if this doesn't make sense in terms of how the code is written. That is, there would be no performance improvement in a "Hide All" function over "CTRL-A, hide one to hide 'em all."
I'll indeed choose to close this. I'm afraid that hiding all instruments is in general not a common-enough operation to warrant investing UI space into a dedicated button for it. Selecting all instruments and then clicking the eye button of one of them is indeed the proper way to hide multiple instruments at once.
One tip: it's not necessary to use Ctrl+A, which also selects all elements in the score. Instead, in the Layout panel, you can click on the top instrument and then hold Shift while clicking on the bottom instrument, to select them all. This might result in slightly better performance, because the list of selected elements does not change.
For the rest, the operation of hiding all instruments can indeed be expected to take a while: the entire layout needs to be recomputed.
There is also this issue: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/13748 which covers the fact that hiding multiple instruments in one click creates multiple undo steps, and maybe also causes multiple re-layouts, which causes the inefficiency. But that wouldn't be solved by having a "hide all" button, so will have to be done separately.
