1: It would be great if there were a good pattern management system, where you could see all created (non-empty) patterns and see which ones are used in your song. Often when arranging patterns using the position editor a pattern becomes unused in the song and you have to remember all the numbers to get them back again. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t write music in a linear way.
2: Maybe this is way out of line and would confuse everyone else who is used to keyboard layouts from other trackers but… I think it would be really nice if the pattern editing could be done mostly with the keyboard behaving like it does in a text editor (Like Developer Studio or TextPAD etc.), holding shift and moving the arrow keys to make selections, then the usual ^X ^C ^V to cut/copy/paste, and holding cntrl to move words (tracks).
Do you know you can use ctrl+up/down to go to previous/next pattern and ctrl+left/right to change the number of the current pattern?
I suggest adding a couple more keyboard shortcuts here:
ctrl+shift+left/right: find the previous/next used pattern
(ie same as ctrl+left/right but skipping unused patterns)
ctrl+tab: find the next unused pattern
ctrl+shift+tab: find the previous unused pattern
(ie same as ctrl+left/right but skipping used patterns)
To copy/paste like you describe, the difference isn’t that big: press ctrl+B to begin the selection, move the cursor, press ctrl+E to end the selection. Press ctrl+c/x to copy/cut the selection. Then move the cursor and press ctrl+v as usual to paste at the new position. It’s actually simpler, because you don’t have to hold shift when moving. And you don’t lose the selection when moving the cursor afterwards.
With 1.2 coming right around the corner, you can define which keys do what yourself, so just switch “next track” from tab to ctrl+right etc and you’ve got what you want, basically.