Assign Drag for selecting & Shift Drag for "scrolling"?

• Oct 5, 2020 - 01:38

Is there a preference or setting(s) that allow me to swap the behavior of Drag and Shift Drag in MuseScore?

  • In virtually all apps the user simply drags to select objects. (By drag I mean click & drag.)
  • And in many of those same Shift Drag will "x/y scroll" the document in its window.

I would like my MuseScore workspace to conform to that standard.

To recap:

  • I want Drag to select MuseScore items (what Shift drag currently does.)
  • I want Shift Drag to "scroll" -- OR -- extend the selection.

Scorster


Comments

It's not a bad suggestion, but note: dragging (with or without shift) is almost never the best way to select anything in MuseScore. Far more useful would be to get used to the more efficient / more precise methods of selection like click / Shift+click.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

  
Hi Marc,

Thanks for your thoughts.

Marc wrote:

> dragging (with or without shift) is almost never the best way to select anything in MuseScore.

It sounds like you're aware of selectional disadvantages to Shift-Drag and selectional advantages to Click + ShiftClick. If so, could you please list some disadvantages of the former and advantages to the latter? I've been unable to think what those may be, except perhaps that Range Selections via *Click + ShiftClick may be more inclusive of objects along the timeline, leaving less, or nothing, behind.

>Far more useful would be to get used to the more efficient / more precise methods of selection like click / Shift+click.

For the record, I've used Click + ShiftClick and Click + Ctrl/Cmd Click extensively ... otherwise I'd have been unable to explore MuseScore much at all, because it wasn't until a few weeks in that aware of Shift-Drag.

I do find Shift-Drag overly selective of unmarqueed chord tones, often producing the result of Click + Shift Click.

I achieve more intendedly granular results with Ctrl/Cmd Click. And I wonder why Shift-Drag selects notes out of its marquee selection region—that's seems counter intuitive to me.

Scorster

In reply to by scorster

Dragging is always imprecise, it's hard to get exactly what you want into the selection. It's also a physically slower operation for most selections than the others (including purely keyboard-based methods like Shift+Right, Sift+Ctrl+Right, etc.

In any event, Shift+drag always does a range selection - by definition, all notes/rests between the beginning and end of the selection. If you want to select individual elements select rather than an entire range, indeed you need Ctrl (Cmd) click. Different types of selections for different types of operations. Some things only work on range selection, some things are only possible using list selections. For more information on all of this, see the Handbook.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.