Clean Up That Gui!

[martyfmelb]

Here’s a number of what I believe to be basic GUI oversights:

Menu stuff:

• Renoise lacks “Delete” menu items in both the Arranger and the Pattern Editor context menus.
• The “right mouse button” key doesn’t bring up the context menu for any focused area. It just acts like Shift+Space.

Click, Drag, and Multiselect:

• If I double-click on the Volume or Panning column, I actually want my edit cursor in the Volume or Panning column (not the note column).
• Even better, a single click without drag should relocate the cursor right away.
• Mouse pointer doesn’t turn into the “can’t drop here” barred-circle symbol when you can’t drop a dragged pattern (from the arranger) or pattern selection (from the editor) somewhere.
• Can’t multiselect instruments or samples (e.g. to delete a bunch of crap recording takes)
• No right-click drag in Pattern Editor.
• No meaningful right-click drag from Disk Browser.
• Can’t move/copy files or folders in Disk Browser.

Big lists stuff:

• Can’t expand instrument list down the page at all. A toggle button to expand the instrument list to include the length of the area of the Advanced Edit panel would be awesome. If said AE panel is open, pull it leftward to make room for the big instrument list.
• Disk Browser needs something like this too. It’ll encourage more experimentation with different instruments.

Mute stuff

• Mute only takes effect when I mouse-up. I feel it would be more useful for livesets on mouse-down.
• Consequently, I can’t “swipe-mute” a whole bunch of tracks by dragging my mouse over several oscilloscopes. I think FT2 let me do this. But now I must click each one in series. Ew.
• To make this new behaviour more palatable, mute should be undoable.

Pattern Ed stuff:

• “Fill-down” handle at the bottom-right of a selection (like Excel’s fill down)
• Please let Del delete the selection. Give us “Clear”!

Cheerio

[vvoois (vV)]

@martyfmelb

Here’s a number of what I believe to be basic GUI oversights:

I agree with various, like multiple selection of instruments and samples in the tables.

There are some things that sound strange or illogical to me and some options you may not have found an available solution to:

• Renoise lacks “Delete” menu items in both the Arranger and the Pattern Editor context menus.

What does “cut” do to your unlikings that "delete"doesn’t?

• Please let Del delete the selection. Give us “Clear”!

Reassign the cut selection (ALT-F3) to the del-key if you desire, you can configure all your keyoperations by yourself in the preferences.

• The “right mouse button” key doesn’t bring up the context menu for any focused area. It just acts like Shift+Space.

Yups, it is double and dubiously described in the transport key assignment list. I have no idea why this is so actually.

• Mouse pointer doesn’t turn into the “can’t drop here” barred-circle symbol when you can’t drop a dragged pattern (from the arranger) or pattern selection (from the editor) somewhere.

It doesn’t but you can quite obviously see what shall happen to the contents when you make that attempt: What is marked will get replaced / overwritten. Undo would save you from total disaster in those cases.

• No right-click drag in Pattern Editor.

Should all drag features be consistent in every area?;

• No meaningful right-click drag from Disk Browser.

Or did you rather meanted that right-click drag in the diskbrowser should be cut out?

• Can’t move/copy files or folders in Disk Browser.

ctrl+F and try again there. Works pretty too quick imho.

• Mute only takes effect when I mouse-up. I feel it would be more useful for livesets on mouse-down.

Renoise was not designed to be used as a live application, being able to change your mind is regular behavior for clicking icons like that (click and drag away mouse then release to prevent the action from happening) For the mute icons this is not logical but lets say you don’t want to overwrite a certain song because you realise suddenly that you need some parts from the existing song.
Mouse behavior is global in the application.

• To make this new behaviour more palatable, mute should be undoable.

Mute is a controller switch and not a figure belonging to your songsketch (even though the track mute state is written along with the song) so this seems more a personal desire than a logical request.

• “Fill-down” handle at the bottom-right of a selection (like Excel’s fill down)

It depends on what you want to do, if you want to copy the same contents from your selection till the end of your track('s) then continues paste would be your shortcut (ctrl+p). If you want certain vol/pan/effect values to increase or change in a certain manner, you go to the advanced edit and toggle the vol/pan/effect tab options to your needs and apply it to the whole selection.

[Garf]

I’ll pitch in. Make the add/remove pattern icons a bit more intuitive, I find they conflict with the arrow buttons just below.

Download the icons if you like, put them in “\Program Files\Renoise 1.9.0\Skin\Icons”:
InsertSeqPos.bmp
DeleteSeqPos.bmp

[martyfmelb]

What does “cut” do to your unlikings that "delete"doesn’t?

Cut overwrites the clipboard. I do, however, like your suggestion for mapping Cut to the delete key until a “real” Clear command is available: I’ll just have to remember my song clipboard will be overwritten each time I use Del.

• Mouse pointer doesn’t turn into the “can’t drop here” barred-circle symbol when you can’t drop a dragged pattern (from the arranger) or pattern selection (from the editor) somewhere.

It doesn’t but you can quite obviously see what shall happen to the contents when you make that attempt: What is marked will get replaced / overwritten. Undo would save you from total disaster in those cases.

I have tried odd things like dragging pattern data to the Disk Browser. There is no obvious visual cue that this won’t work. (If I try the same behaviour in an Office application, a Scrap file is created containing the selection, hence my inference that it could work here too.) However, the barred-circle pointer DOES appear when trying to drag-drop an instrument into the pattern editor. So in my view, this is indeed a UI clean-up.

• No right-click drag in Pattern Editor.
  Should all drag features be consistent in every area?;

As much as possible, yes. I think the dev(s?) already started down the “same everywhere” road when the decision was made to have Ctrl-X,C,V as the main clipboard keys.

• No meaningful right-click drag from Disk Browser.
  Or did you rather meanted that right-click drag in the diskbrowser should be cut out?

Until such time that right-mouse-button drag is implemented in other portions of Renoise, yes, I agree with this.

• Can’t move/copy files or folders in Disk Browser.
  ctrl+F and try again there. Works pretty too quick imho.

It does… until you decide to try using Renoise to sort your instruments into folders based on audio content: for example, when assimilating a sample pack into one’s own instrument collection. Renoise allows previewing as you browse. Explorer sure as hell doesn’t, at least for (X)RNI’s. (I am aware that WAVs and MP3s are previewable in Explorer if you have Picaview, but not everyone has that.)

• Mute only takes effect when I mouse-up. I feel it would be more useful for livesets on mouse-down.

• Consequently, I can’t “swipe-mute” a whole bunch of tracks by dragging my mouse over several oscilloscopes. I think FT2 let me do this. But now I must click each one in series. Ew.

Renoise was not designed to be used as a live application, being able to change your mind is regular behavior for clicking icons like that (click and drag away mouse then release to prevent the action from happening) For the mute icons this is not logical but lets say you don’t want to overwrite a certain song because you realise suddenly that you need some parts from the existing song.
Mouse behavior is global in the application.

I see… and I have a way around each issue. Undoable mute on mouse-down (aka Hard-Mute): shift-click. For swipe-mute (sweep-mute?), shift-drag. For multiple mute at once, select multiple tracks (heh) by dragging the mouse from one track label, across to others, like one might do in the arranger over pattern numbers. Then mute the lot at once by clicking one of their oscilloscopes, or one of their “PLAY” indicators. Allow shift-click here too if one should want to buffer multi-muting into undo

• “Fill-down” handle at the bottom-right of a selection (like Excel’s fill down)

It depends on what you want to do, if you want to copy the same contents from your selection till the end of your track('s) then continues paste would be your shortcut (ctrl+p).

I had no idea that existed. Awesome.

I feel like I’ve just finished a rant! Terrible of me