Add toolbar toggles to View menu

• Dec 23, 2015 - 13:15
Reported version
3.0
Type
Graphical (UI)
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore
Tags
ux

Through the contact form, we receive more and more questions similar like this one:

"While we were using MuseScore, the notes bar disappeared from the top of the window. We don't know what happened. Can you help us?"

The solution is explained at
* https://musescore.org/en/node/84486
* https://musescore.org/en/node/63606
and many other places.

I wonder what we can do against this and how other software is coping with this.

A consequence of this is that user hitting this problem try to solve it by reinstalling MuseScore again which doesn't work as the preferences are not removed. For that issue, see #88711: Add "remove settings/preferences" checkbox in uninstall wizard

Comments

• Dec 23, 2015 - 14:36

Most software that I am familiar with handles toolbars one of two ways:

1) A variety of different toolbars are available, and are individually enabled or disabled from a section of the View menu;

2) One unified toolbar is available, with a "Customize Toolbar" available upon right-click to choose which of the available commands are included in the toolbar.

I'm not sure which of these two MuseScore is more similar to. MuseScore does do multiple separate toolbars which can be toggled on and off, like (1); MuseScore also lets you choose what to display based on right-clicking on the toolbar, like (2). However, in either of those two common systems it's significantly more difficult to accidentally remove content from the toolbar, and if you do it's a lot more obvious what to do to get them back.

LibreOffice.png LbreOffice1.png
Preview.png

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• Dec 23, 2015 - 14:44

A reaction from werner via chat: "I am not aware of changes in the Qt GUI to hide a toolbar. Just looked up in the Qt docs that especially the hide operation cannot be locked (but movable and floating)."

@Zack Thanks for the research. I guess MuseScore could benefit from making a Toolbar entry under the View menu. Not?

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• Dec 23, 2015 - 15:06

Any other votes for the menu approach and discarding the right-click controls?

I'm pro for this as I believe it will cause less confusion for users who know 'accidentally' right-click and disable one or more toolbars.

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• Dec 23, 2015 - 15:32

The reason I feel that's kind of odd is that a couple of the "toolbars" are actually just single buttons—i.e., enabling the Image Capture toolbar means adding one icon. In some ways, things are already closer to category (2)—a single customizable toolbar.

However, given that it's probably much simpler to just move a few commands from a context menu into the main menu, it's probably not worth the effort of the reconfiguring. Perhaps customizable toolbars—or just differently combined default toolbars—are worth looking at in the future, though.

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• Dec 23, 2015 - 15:54

Idea: Add toolbar controls to View menu, and keep right-click controls—but put the latter behind a "Customize Toolbars" submenu. So, if you right-click, you get a context menu of one item ("Customize Toolbars") with the rightward-pointing arrow indicating the submenu, which then has the checkboxes for the different toolbars. A very small change, but I have a feeling this could go a long way towards preventing accidents.

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• Dec 28, 2015 - 12:44

Personally, I appreciate and always use the right-click in the toolbar.

Especially for the Inspector. I do not like having it always open (it takes up space and makes lose "visibility" or "comfortable space" of the score), but I like being able to open very quickly with the right-click (I prefer this to the F8 key ... Sometimes, it was not rare, I fall on a next or other key ...!)

I understand the different points of view, but it is difficult to prevent users from doing bad maneuvers in any field whatsoever. This is part of learning.
When this is understood, we appreciate the benefits of the current behavior. Otherwise, functions end up by getting lost in mazes.
If the documentation is very clear and well pointed out, it is already a good prevention.
My opinion.

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• Dec 28, 2015 - 15:20

I don't like the idea of a menu with only one item, especially just one item that opens a submenu. Seems this would violate most UI design guidelines, and add unnecessary complexity.

But I have no problem with having both the context menu and View menu - I don't think that would seem non-standard.

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• Oct 9, 2016 - 17:05

Managing the visibility of toolbars is done inside the qt gui toolkit. There is no way in the interface (as far as i can see) to disable this functionality. So the current "solution" is only a hack.

Hiding toolbars is standard functionality for all qt apps and i don't like the idea of disabling this functionality even if it would be possible. Maybe its best to implement a "master reset" button to reset all kind of staff to "factory settings".

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• Oct 9, 2016 - 18:51

The implementation Werner was talking about is here https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/commit/d9dd7cf09d5bcb79531ce9d2b…

I understand it's a Qt construct, and I think it's a good one, we should deactivate it for the note entry toolbar. Better to have an easy way to make it appear again in View.

The right click menu only bother me for the text tool toolbar. This one is very different from the other toolbars in MuseScore and according to me, it should not appear in this menu.

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• Oct 9, 2016 - 19:40

It's possible to customize the right click menu by overriding the QMainWindow::createPopupMenu()
Returning NULL will disable it completely (nothing will happen), but we can also delete some items (I would remove the text tool one to start with) or reorganize them.

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