Speed of Navigator
Hi,
I've been having some slowdown problems with a large-ish score when the navigator is visible. I've got 300 measures of 7 staves, and most operations take nearly a second - even ones which don't seem to be capable of affecting the score layout, such as double clicking on a chord symbol element and moving the text input cursor within the field. If I hide the Navigator everything goes back to usual speed.
Presumably this is because it needs to render the whole document after every change in order to update the Navigator preview. I wonder if, in future, it might be useful to perform this in a separate thread? Nobody is likely to notice if it takes a couple of seconds to update the Navigator, whereas unresponsive editing makes the whole program rather difficult to use. In the meantime, are there any tips I can use that might help speed things up? I wondered if adding page breaks would reduce the amount of layout recalculation it would have to do, but that doesn't seem to help.
Comments
As an alternative to Navigator you could be using Timeline, as that doesn't render the score it shouldn't have that performance penalty, but still allow navigatging
In reply to As an alternative to… by Jojo-Schmitz
Yes - I did have a look at that, unfortunately I didn't really get along with it (some reasons in another post). For what I'm after it's too big, and the way it shows your current position is quite low-contrast. I think on the whole I'd be happy enough with just a scrollbar, but that isn't an option.
Moving the cursor require relayout of just that text in order to show the cursor, which in turn could result in more but normally doesn't. The navigator though probably isn't that smart.
As for tips to speed things up, biggest one I can offer is not to use the navigator, I find it irrelevant regardless of score size. Ordinary cursor keys including Home/End/PgUp/Pd combine with scrolling and Ctrl+F to jump quickly to specific locations (measure number, rehearsal mark, page) - and very occasionally timeline - is more than sufficient for me.
I could also imagine just popping up the timeline or navigator when needed then immediately closing it again, which I tend to anyhow because I'd rather have the space for my score.