Give focus should not input note

• Sep 25, 2016 - 10:10

I often work with MuseScore on the left of the screen and a music player on the right (writing the score of traditionnal music recordings).
After stopping the music player, I click on the musescore side to give focus.
If I click in the score it inputs a note.
It should not because:
-this is annoying because you must be careful of the place you click just to give focus
-this is not the standard behaviour of programs: e.g. give the focus to MS-Word by clicking on the "Bold" button, MS-Word gets focus but doesn't put the selected text in bold.
Thanks


Comments

MuseScore has a few different modes, depending on whether you want to input notes, add other elements to notes and rests, or alter individual elements already added. It sounds like you're in note input mode. Just turn it off from the N button at the top left of the toolbar.

Or are you saying that you did that, but then switching back to MuseScore automatically turns note input on again?

In reply to by Isaac Weiss

Note input mode is not automatically turned on, and indeed 'give focus' inputs a note only when you were in note input mode.
But the problem is more general: When you click somewhere on the MuseScore window to give focus, the action that is linked to the place you click is immediately triggered instead of just giving focus.
While MuseScore doesn't have the focus:
click on a menu => the menu is opened
or:
click on a note duration => the duration takes effect
or:
click on the score (not in note input mode) => the clicked note is selected.
Try with MS-Word: you will see that it isn't the case: when MS-Word doesn't have the focus:
click on a menu doesn't open the menu (just give focus)
click somewhere in the text: MS-Word takes focus but the cursor position is left unchanged and you can continue to type exactly where you was.

This last use case is especially important I think: you are busy in a score, then you temporarily use another application, clicking somewhere on the musescore app should give focus again (only that!) and you can continue to work exactly where you were.

In reply to by frfancha

I'm not understanding what you mean. Are you saying that some programs on your computer doesn't actually respond when you click on something if the window doesn't already have focus? I don't have any programs on my computer that work that way - that would seem like a bug to me, actually. I am on Linux so I don't have Word, but I tried Chrome, XChat, my terminal program, and a few others, and all respond instantly to clicks whether the program already ahd focus or not. Or am I misunderstanding something? On all supported systems - Windows, Linux, and Mac - Cltr+Tab is the way to switch betwene programs without triggering an action.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc,
You're right: only some programs, when not having focus, respond to click event by taking focus and ONLY doing that instead of also doing the "normal" action linked to the place where you click.
The programs with such a behavior are programs for which the cursor position is important: therefore it is convenient to have the possibility to just click anywhere to give focus and not loosing the cursor position, begin able to continue to enter data exactly where you were without having to target the exact previous cursor position which is perhaps not even visible on screen.
Programs I know with this behavior:
MS-Word
MS-Excel
MS-Powerpoint
I'm simply suggesting that Musescore could adopt this very convenient behaviour.
Fred

In reply to by frfancha

Well, now that I have a Windows computer, i can check a few more things. I don't use Word, but I checked Notepad, OneNote, LibreOffice, and the text editing modes of Chrome and Edge, and all of these work the standard way - clicking to give focus moves the cursor to that position, exactly as I would expect. However, Wordpad has the same behavior you describe for Word. Seems like a bug to me - I don't like the idea of clicking working sometimes but not other times. If you want to change focus without actually triggering an action, that's what shortcuts like Alt+tab are for - or clicking the title bar. Clicking the active area of the window should always have the normal effect in my opinion.

Anyhow, I suspect this sort of thing is all handled automatically by Qt so there probably isn't anything MuseScore could do even if we wanted to, although I could be wrong about that.

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