Losing focus for selection when zooming

Does Ctrl shift +'work? What keyboard layout?

Other than that this seems a duplicate of #82601: Add Ctrl+= as alternate shortcut for zoom in

I don't understand what you mean; there should be no need to scroll through the entire score. I would suggest you ask for help in the Support forum, attaching the specific score you are having problems with a D precise step by step instruction to reproduce the problem.

Is zoomes around the mouse arrow doesn't it?

And this issue shows the danger of having opened one issue for multiple items.

Sorry, I still don't understand. When you zoom in, the view stays focused on the same page you were viewing - some portion of what you were seeing before will be what you are seeing after. Of course, zooming in also means that some portion of the page that was previously visible will now be just barely off screen. But even if the measure you were interested in happens to be now offscreen, you don't have to scroll through the "whole score" to find it.

FWIW, "selection" is irrelevant - you might have nothing selected, or the selection might be on another page entirely, or it might span multiple pages, etc. So MuseScore cannot really use selection as its way of guessing wehat part of the page to center on. No matter what it guesses, it's going to be right sometimes, wrong sometimes, but the measure you care about will always be nearby.

It seems to me that if the selection is on-screen now and I click zoom then it should stay on-screen. If the selection is not currently on-screen then it should be ignored when zooming.

What if the selection is bigger than the screen? Like the whole score is selected? Or, what if *part* of the selection is on screen, part not? Or, what if the selection was made by ctrl+clicking one element from the top left corner of the page and another from the bottom right corner? I really don't think using selection as a key here is a great idea; I think it will just make the behavior look unpredictable to the avergae user who doesn't know the secret.

They don't strike me as insurmountable problems. LibreOffice zooms on a selection if it is currently visible, and it zooms in on the end of the selection if it is only partly visible.

Note also that if you do want more control over where the zoom is focuses, simply use Ctr l + mouse wheel; then the cursor position becomes the focal point. I guess we could consider using that same technique for Ctrl++, but I am not sure that would really seem very intutive - if you are using the keybaord shortcut, you probably aren't paying much attention to the mouse position.

FWIW, it seems currently we try to keep the top left corner anchored. I could see shooting for the center instead. But having gone back and forth on these things a few times before over the past couple of years, I know it's trickier than you might think to come up with a behavior that makes sense all the time.

Fair enough. I haven't tried implementing it myself. GIMP seems to ignore the current selection entirely, so there is no standardised behaviour here. To me it would seem intuitive that Ctrl + mouse wheel would follow the cursor (since the mouse controls the cursor) and Ctrl++ (or View -> Zoom) would follow the selection (since the mouse is irrelevant here), but I haven't actually tried them.

Just add this to your shortcuts in the preferences dialog

Just because you don't have a mouse doesn't mean you cannot use a mouse wheel gesture. Depending on your specific computer, it might be configured as two fonger swipe, or maybe a swipe along a special zone to the side of the mousepad, maybe in conjunction with holding the Ctrl key, or perhaps something else. See the settings for your touchpad to find out if this feature exists - almost all modern touchpad drivers provide this.

Anyhow, again, as explained above, zooming by shortcut does not "lose" focus. MuseScore simply does not know know what part of the screen you might happen to be interested, so it makes a choice - currently, the top left corner is normally retained. No matter what it picked, though, it would be right sometimes, wrong other times - it cannot read your mind.

The focus is not where the selection is, but where the mouse arrow is. And the shortcut does work, at leat is does for me.

Not sure what you mean by "lose focus", but by definition, zooming *always* loses sopme part of what you are viewing. It is impossible to zoom otherwise. the only question is which part of the view is retained. As I have said, in MuseScore, it keeps the upper left. Presumably you would prefer some other part of the view, but again, MuseScore cannot read minds. No matter which part of the view it retained, it would be right sometimes, wrong sometimes.

The shortcut for zoom in is Ctrl++. If your keybaord happens to require Shift to access "+", then of course you need to press Shift as part of that. You are also welcome to redefine the shortcut via Edit / Preferences / Shortcuts.

For example: here is a typical view:

And here is the what happens after zooming in via the menu or via the shortcut:

As you can see, the top left corner remained in view.

The problem is, there are many different keybaord layouts in the world. The default works on most, but it is next to impossible to get one set of shortcuts that works for every possible keybaord layout in the world.

Again, you *do not* need to scroll the the entire score after a zoom. The top left corner always remains in view, exactly as my screenshot shows. So you only might need to scroll slightly down and to the right.

When using mouse wheel, it makes sense that mouse position is relevant. It doesn't make sense to use mouse position when not using the mouse.

Maps are not read left to right, top to bottom, and thus are different from music. With music, I find it much more intuitive to keep the anchor at the top left rather than at the center most of the time. But again, whether the anchor point is the top left or center, it is what you want sometimes, not what you want sometimes, and the difference either way is negligible - one second of scrolling afterwards gets you where you want.

As I keep saying, no matter which spot MuseScore would keep in view, it would be the right answer sometimes, the wrong answer other times. Sometimes you will need to scroll slightly after the zoom - that is always true of zoom. it's the very nature of zoom - after a zoom, less is vislbe than behfore, so sometimes you might have to scroll slightly to find the area you were interested in. The actual distance you might need to zoom is the same no matter which spot is chosen as the anchor, and it's always small. Somehow it seems you might be misunderstanding this, as you use phrases like "scroll through the entire score". No, this is never necessary. The point you are interested in is always at most a small distance away, and this would remain true if the default anchor point were change.

Feel free to start a discussion on the forum to see if a consensus develops that a change would make a significant difference. If a large consensus exists saying they would prefer center to top left, we could consider making that change. But I still don't like the idea of a keyboard operation involving the mouse in any way. This is counterintuitive and will make the behavior seem unpredictable, and in any event, in many cases the point won't even be within the score view.

There is really not much more to say here. Right now, the current behavior is by design and as expected by many users. If enough users express a desire to see this changed, it might happen, but this discussion needs to happn in the forum.

BTW, it also occurs to me that if you haven't figured out how to work the "mouse wheel", you probably aren't navigating as efficiently as you could be. Are you perhaps zooming out, dragging the canvas, then zooming back in? Much better to scroll using the touchpad gesture, whatever that works out to be on your computer. Mouse wheel alone to scroll vertically, with Shift to scroll horizontally. Also the Navigator is available in View menu, plus the page up / down / home / end keys. Also Ctrl+F to navigate to a particular measure, page, or rehearsal mark.

I'm working on summarising this thread in a new forum post. I will post a link here when it's ready. Stay tuned!

Thanks! Definitely good material for further discussion. That last post of mine (#29) might be a key component. I can see that if one is using extreme zoom out and drag of canvas as a method of navigation, one may well have different expectations for what happens when zooming back in to normal magnification than for the more ordinary use case of zooming in starting from normal magnification. Also, if one is starting from an extreme zoomed out state such that page 1 is in view when begining the processing of zooming back in, I can see how one might develop the misperception that the zoom in always starts from the top left of the *score* when in fact it is actually always starting with the top elft of the *crrent* view. Again, when zooming in from extremely small magnifications to normal magnifications, this is going to seem very different from zooming in from normal magnifications to higher ones. This could perhaps be part of the basis of how we consider tweaking the algorithm.

Please continue the discussion here: https://musescore.org/en/node/83966

As shoogle said, please do continue the discussion… at https://musescore.org/en/node/83966.