How to put in rests

Mike has raised this topic before. He's accustomed to programs (including, if I recall correctly, Finale and Encore) that explicitly make available a set of buttons for rest durations as well as note durations, essentially considering a rest to be something wholly other than a note, and finds it very difficult to adjust to programs (such as MuseScore and Sibelius) that do it this way, with only one rest button plus the duration buttons, considering a rest to simply be a note with the extra property of silence. There's really nothing more than can be said, except that Sibelius's rest icon shows two rests of different durations, and it would probably help if MuseScore didn't show just the quarter rest.

Well, I actually agree that having a rest palette could be a good thing, although I disagree that entering rests is currently "convoluted" - it's just slightly non-obvious, and requires one extra click for the users who for whatever reason choose to use the less efficient mouse entry method over the more efficient keybaord entry method.

Enter a note basically requires two steps whether using mouse or keyboard: select duration, click on staff or type note name. So that's pretty much maximally efficient whether using mouse or keybaord

Entering rests, on the other hand, requires two steps only for keyboard (select duration, type "0") and hence is maximally efficient, but if for whatever reason you choose to enter notes and rests with the mouse, there is an extra click involved: you need to select the rest icon as well as selecting the duration and entering the rest. It's not necessarily one click *per rest* - once you click the rest icon, you can then enter as many rests as you want at two clicks per rest. So it's one extra click per *sequence* of rests you wish to enter. Hard to say what the average sequence length is, but if it's 2, then we're really talking about 0.5 extra clicks per rest on average - again, onyl for users who for whatever reaosn choose to use the mosue, which is *always* less efficient than using the keyboard.

So, users who truly care about efficiency will generally choose the keyboard both because it is inherently more efficient than the mouse (no motion back and forth between score and toolbar) but also because it saves that 0.5 clicks per rest. Users who for whatever reason choose the mouse are penalized with the extra 0.5 clicks per rest *on top of* the general penalty for using the mouse (the constant motion back and forth between score and toolbar).

So, it's illogical to call rest entry "convoluted". If you value efficiency primarily, you use the keyboard and it's already maximally efficient. If for whatever reaosn you choose the mosue instead, you pay only on extra 0.5 cliks per rest on top of the penalty you already pay for using the mosue in the first place.

That said, having a rest palette would save that extra 0.5 clicks per rest, so what the heck. As long as it was something that keyboard users could close (since it is irrelevant for keyboard users and would only take up space), why not. It would provide a very slight improvement in efficiency for mouse users, and would eliminiate that potential for confusion that we see maybe once every few months. A small win to be sure, and nothing to get so worked up about, but a win nonetheless.