Learning the UI (or not)

Hello all.
I’m excited to get to using Renoise as I recently found out about the tracker workflow and have always wondered how Jungle was made - there was a real lightbulb moment when I realised. I guess it should have been somewhat obvious, hehe.

I’m on a PC, but seem to be having major issues getting used to the foundations of the UI - mouse functions that are ubiquitous across programs and platforms such as click & drag, double clicking or click to select seem to be repurposed in Renoise, but sometimes they aren’t.
Perhaps it’s my ‘old dog’ mentality, but it’s proper getting on my nerves! It’s as though any creativity I have is being stifled by having to realearn how to use a bloody computer, let alone the program.

So, my question is, has anyone encountered a good way of learning the ‘new way’ the mouse works in Renoise? Mods, videos etc, etc.
I’m perfectly willing to learn in order to get what I want done, but I just thought I’d ask people in the know before beginning an endless search of the internet.
Thanks very much in advance for any help!

Imo get acquainted with keyboard shortcuts instead of mousing, also take notice what part of the gui has focus. Sometimes keyboard shortcuts, or fluidity of mouse actions are dependent on what has focus; red brackets around the sections;

image

You can mouse click across the gui and notice if these red brackets appear on where you click. Sometimes red brackets don’t appear on left mouse click, for example the instrument selector list or disk op (= browser), here you can middle mouse click to shift the focus.

There are some options in the preferences that might be of use, check out the; edit/preferences/gui tab, here in pattern editor you can configure if a single click will set the cursor, otherwise a double click is needed in the pattern editor. Also you can set the behavior of how drag and dropping works;
image

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Yes, really getting the keyboard focus concept drilled into your mind should absolutely be your number one priority.

I learned Renoise with no tracker history a few years ago and probably 50%+ of the headaches I had trying to do so were related to keyboard focus and me forgetting that it existed.

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Alt+Click also changes focus, in case you don’t have a middle click.

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@Jonas @Mumdad - thanks very much for getting back to me.
I’d heard about the keyboard shortcuts etc, but hadn’t realised that things were so focussed (pun kind of intended) on its use.
I’ll certainly dedicate some time to becoming familiar with them.
Thanks again!

the other solution is to write global shortcuts so the focus doesn’t matter

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For me, just FAFOing (f@$!ing around and finding out) got me most of the way when first starting with Renoise. That and going in without the expectation that it will behave the same as more “standardized” software. I use a lot of unconventiaonal tools/software and am use to there being quirks in how things function. Beyond that, @Achenar makes all of the exceptional Renoise Tutorials, as well as @slujr. Anytime I couldn’t figure out why something worked the way it did (or didn’t work) I came here to the forum and almost always got a thorough explanation (either by asking in a new thread or searching through old ones). Also, the manual! Read the Manual.

https://www.youtube.com/@renoise/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@xenobaba/videos

https://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Welcome

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