Note and rest presentation

I believe the plugin interface is not up to the job here. As far as I know it's not possible to replace notes/rests with the plugin framework.

The fact that there is room for disagreement about the "best" way to do this is part of why I was thinking this would be something more naturally handled as a plug-in.

But I also have in mind the notion that the main application itself should be kept relativly streamlined, focusing on features "necessary" in order to produce some particular result efficiently. If you already know how to produce good rhythmic notation, a feature like the one we are discussing wouldn't be necessary - you'd just enter the notes that way in the first place. So I think of it more as a "compositional aid", along the lines of taking a melody and re-writing it backwards or upside down for the purpose creating twelve-tone serial pieces, or automatically figuring out appropriate harmonies to use for a melody, or automatically improvising a melody to fit a specified chord progression. Such features might be described as allowing to use Musescore as "scratch pad" to put down not-yet-fully-formed ideas, and having the program help you turn them into "real music".

And I don't mean to denigrate the value of such features. I'm just saying, I see that as one way of looking at the question of what might belong in the program and what might belong in a separate plug-in. Not that it's my place to be saying what goes in and what doesn't. I am just saying, it seems pretty likely that the folks doing the actual development would not consider a feature like this high enough priority to implement, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Hence the thought that a plug-in could be the way to go.

As for the actual feasibility of doing it that way, I don't doubt that the current framework would present obstacles, but I'm still unclear on what really can and cannot be done. I mean, while you might not be able to "replace" notes, you *can* delete notes, and you *can* add notes. There are methods for that, and at least sometimes, they work. I've played around with things like having a plug-in delete some notes currently in a measure and then insert new ones, with mixed results. As I said, some things I try work, others don't, and other crash MuseScore. I haven't yet spent the time to really get to the point of understanding what is possible and what is not, or how much of what is not possible is that way by design, versus because of bugs in the Cursor.add() method (which is my suspicion). But given that deleting and adding notes works *sometimes*, it still seems within the realm of possibility that it could be made to work here, with at most maybe needing some minor (?) bugs or limitations in the framework addressed first. Unless there really is something I'm missing here regarding what the add(0 and delete() methods are and are not supposed to be able to do.

Even if it worked, there would be limitations in such an approach, no doubt. The new notes would not be able to inherit many of the properties or items attached to the old ones (eg, staccato markings might disappear). That's one reason I mentioned wanting the ability to access more note properties and other elements in my thread from a few weeks ago on possible extensions to the framework. But even without those extensions, I could still see this being a useful utility - you'd just have to be in the habit of using it early in the compositional process, before adding much in the way of other markings..