Allow document drag with middle mouse button
Please add the ability to pan the document by dragging the middle mouse button. In the same way that Ctrl-scroll wheel has become zoom in most applications, middle-click and drag has become the main way to move around a document.
I would like to see this implemented. The idea is that it would always work the same way clicking and dragging on an empty spot with the left-mouse button currently does. It wouldn't matter if the mouse was over a note or anything else. Nor would it matter if you were in notation mode.
Having it this way is extremely intuitive, since you never need to think about where the mouse actually is (assuming it is in the document at all). And, currently, the middle mouse button is complete unused, which seems to be a waste.
No matter how much I work with MuseScore, I keep trying to use this feature, just because it's so ubiquitous in other programs that have documents that need to be panned.
Comments
I did an experiment here https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2124
It's pretty easy to enable the middle button in normal mode and make sure that we can use it when hovering an element. But it's not that easy to make it work smoothly during note entry. In note entry we force the score view to show the cursor. I'm not really sure what the expected behavior is in note entry.
I'm glad I checked back. I thought I posted a response, but, apparently, I never clicked send.
What you say seems strange to me, because the program has no problem scrolling the cursor offscreen when you use the scroll wheel in notation mode. It's just that using the scroll wheel is so much less convenient (especially for horizontal scrolling--scrolling up and down with shift to go left and right is weird).
The intended use case is that you can edit some measure that is currently on screen, and then quickly move to an offscreen measure and edit that. So, yes, ideally the cursor would scroll offscreen, just like with scrolling. If that requires temporarily turning off an option to force the cursor to be onscreen, that would be acceptable. You just should probably turn it back on on the next (left or right) click.
I guess an alternative could be to turn off the cursor itself when panning, then put it back on the first element that would not cause the screen to scroll. Or, if possible, leave it off, but still have the next (left or right) click work in notation mode.
Still, even having it only when not in notation mode is an improvement. I could see splitting this issue into two parts if necessary.
Came up again in https://musescore.org/en/node/272804
Pan with middle mouse button works in master (MuseScore 3.0). While in note entry mode, panning is disabled.
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.