Shortcuts for palettes (popovers)
One of the ideas for this GSoC (2020) was to implement palette shortcuts: custom keyboard shortcuts for individual palette elements.
While this feature would be useful, a much more powerful one would be to implement shortcuts for the palettes themselves. As in Dorico's popover feature, they would consist in entering the key command for the palette, typing a shorthand for the palette's element, and hitting return. It also reminds me of MuseScore's existing Chord Symbol feature, as the concept is somewhat similar.
To allow for maximum customization, key commands for palettes, as well as the shorthands for individual elements, could be made tweakable by the user.
It is also worth mentioning that all elements in all default palettes are not made equal. So, for example, while in the 'key signatures' palette we can find all similar elements, in the 'lines' palette we can further divide the elements into smaller groups: pedal marks, ottava lines, volta lines, etc. Something similar happens in the 'tempo' palette, where we have tempo values (value equals number), tempo words and tempo equivalences.
This could be taken into account to make the shorthands simpler and shorter.
To take a reference from Dorico, which does this wonderfully, the user hits the key command relating to tempo, writes 'Andantino q=92' and the program automatically displays the text and the tempo value (quarter equals ninety-two).
Could this feature make its way into MuseScore? Maybe as part of GSoC 2021?
Comments
Definitely we want to do things like this. But meanwhile, you can already more or less do this using Ctrl+F9 to activate palette search, then type the first few letter of the palette element or palette name (the latter may require 3.5 beta). You can also customize the names of these used in the search, to make it very efficient to search for things uniquely.
In reply to Definitely we want to do… by Marc Sabatella
I didn't know that! Thank you