Opening and closing palettes causes problems with shortcuts

• May 24, 2022 - 05:04

When I open palettes, do what I need to do from within palettes, then close it, none of my shortcuts work, nor can I begin play with the space bar. It's not until I open and close palettes again that everything returns to normal. If I open palettes and close it, without doing anything, everything works fine.
Maybe I should just leave palettes open all the time? By the way, I have a Mac.


Comments

In reply to by James Stockwell

No, this is likely an important clue. Out of the millions of MuseScore users, there have been at least a dozen reports - maybe a couple dozen - of shortcuts stopping working, and almost all of them have been on macOS. So it's a real problem, if rare, and so far no one has been able to reliably reproduce it. But you are I think the third to see a connection to the palettes. So I think that's great info. I doubt it's random, so presumably there is some specific sequence of operations that leads to this issue, and I think at this point it's a good bet that it involves the palettes somehow.

My suspicion is that some particular sequence of steps leads to the palettes somehow "stealing" the keyboard focus, and perhaps if the palette window is closed during that state, the shortcuts stop working. Normally the palettes don't take focus at all, but they can in certain cases. Like, if the last thing you click in the palette isn't an actual element within the palette, but the title bar of one of the individual palettes, or the search box. For me on Linux, if I then close the palette with either the shortcut F9 or clicking the "X" in the window, focus does return to the score, and I can't get it to fail. But maybe on macOS there some variation on this where focus does get lost.

If this theory holds, then one possibility is that either Esc or Tab might return focus to the score when you get to this state.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Very interesting, Marc, and thanks for the great insight into what the problem might be. I use option Z to open and close the palettes window. If I open and close it twice, everything works fine. (strange behavior)
Strangely enough, though, everything seems to be working normally right now.
I sing the praises of Musescore loud and clear to my friends who ask me which notation program I use.
Can't wait for version 4.
Thanks for all the great work that you do!

In reply to by James Stockwell

Thanks! For the record, Option+Z would not normally be the palette shortcut - it's normally F9, which usually require Fn also on some systems. Did you customize it to Option+Z? Or did you mean just plain "Z", which is the shortcut for the special "Symbols" palette specifically, not the standard palettes?

Either way, I'm still expecting it will eventually be discovered that there is some specific sequence of things one can do after opening the palette but before closing it that triggers the problem. And then we can see if wee can reproduce that in current development builds of MuseScore 4, and if so, finally fix it. Although so much of the UI code has been rewritten for MuseScore 4, it's actually pretty unlikely the same bugs would still exist (they will, no doubt, be replaced with new bugs!)

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