Talk:Proposal Cursor Behaviour Improvements

Steve:
 * The fact that the cursor is extended when using the up/down cursor keys is a feature that I use all the time, so I'd definitely not want that to be removed.
 * Bill: You can still do that with shift-downarrow, and that is more consistent as it also add the track to the selection while extending the cursor.
 * The "cursor" is not a "paste here" indicator - it indicates the playback position in the track that currently has focus and all selected tracks. As such it is probably doing what it is supposed to do.
 * Bill: Actually you can have two cursors on the screen at once - the editing cursor and the playback cursor. When you start playback from the cursor position the black cursor remains in place and the green playback cursor follows the audio.
 * Nowhere in the description did you mention that the Track Control Panel of the currently selected track is a different colour. On my flat screen monitor the colour change is extremely subtle (hardly noticeable), but it does change. If the colour change was a lot more obvious then I think that will remove much of the confusion.
 * Bill: About the colour change in the Track Control Panel, that's what I was referring to when I said a track was "selected" (dark colour) or "not selected" (light colour).

Gale: I agree we must keep (A) and (C). (B) is a little questionable maybe, but not demonstrably a bug.

However the cursor doubles as a "paste here" indicator (as well as a "play from here" indicator) when the track is selected. The problem as I see it is the limitation that we only have one type of cursor, which also stops us having a sync-lock selected cursor to match the sync-lock selected region. I understand some may not like to have a "chess board" / "multi-coloured" effect, but I think the meaning of identical-looking cursors is confusing even given the track selected colour is different. The eye is focused on the cursor, not the Track Control Panel.

And yes on my netbook, I simply cannot see any difference between track selected and unselected colour on Ubuntu, but there is a clear difference on Win 7 on the same machine. Is this an issue with wxGTK?

(added later) And you could add region behaviour improvements to the proposal. Arrowing down to move focus (without holding SHIFT) does not currently extend any region into the newly focused track. We know some users would find that handy, for the same reason it's handy that the cursor is extended into the newly focused track. We know some new users are confused that this extension doesn't happen with regions, and believe at first that it means only the track that has the region will actually be audible. Cf Steve's comment below.
 * Bill: Audibility is controlled by the mute and solo buttons. If users are confusing track selection with audibility they need to get over that. I don't think the visible region selection should extend with down-arrow, since that action is merely meant to change track focus. Shift+down-arrow works and is consistent - the selection region appears only in a selected track, similar to shift-clicking on a Track Control Panel.
 * Gale: The inconsistency is that down arrow adds the cursor into the newly focused track, but down arrow when there is a selection has no effect. Also, the cursor looks identical whether the track is fully selected, sync-lock selected or unselected. The cursor may be at the other end of the track from the Track Control Panel, which is the only other indication of selectedness. This suggests to me we either get rid of the "phantom" cursors as you want to do, or accept they are possibly useful, extend them to all unmuted tracks as well (as Steve suggests) and then have "phantom" regions also. Unfortunately, the phantom region boundaries would probably be most easily marked by a dotted line and this is apparently difficult.

Steve: I think there is an issue here, but I don't see the issue to as described above. IMO the question of "where does it get pasted" is a red herring. The answer is simple - it gets pasted in the selected track(s). Where it gets pasted has nothing to do with the cursor.
 * Bill: Not exactly. If a track is selected, paste occurs at the cursor. If no track is selected, a new track is created and paste occurs at time zero. To be consistent, if no track is selected, shouldn't the paste occur at the cursor position in the new track?

However, on Ubuntu with the default Ubuntu theme, there is very little difference in the Track Control Panel colour between a selected track and a not-selected track. In the absence of a clear indication of which track(s) is/are selected, it is easy to mistake the cursor as being something to do with where copied audio will be pasted. Perhaps there is some way of indicating more clearly which track(s) is/are selected?
 * Bill: On Mac the colour distinction is quite clear. See | Audacity Manual, Tracks and Clips, Moving

If it does not do so already, the documentation should make it clear that pasting will go into all tracks that are selected (if possible to do so). Steve: While stopped there is just one black line that indicates both the "play-from" position and the "paste-to" position. Gale: Two tracks, click in the upper one, arrow down, Play, Stop. You still have cursors in two tracks, one selected and pastable, one not.
 * Bill: So on |Edit Menu > Paste, it says "Inserts whatever is on the clipboard at the position of the selection cursor in the project, replacing whatever audio data is currently selected, if any" which is wrong, or at least incomplete. It should say "Inserts whatever is on the clipboard in any selected tracks at the position of the selection cursor in the project, replacing whatever audio data is currently selected, if any." And perhaps this page |Audacity Selection needs to emphasize the distinction between selected and not-selected tracks.
 * Steve I've updated |Edit Menu > Paste in the manual. I don't think that the cursor should necessarily behave the same as a "selection", because it is not a "selection". I suppose another way of looking at which tracks the cursor appears in, is that as it is a playback cursor, why does it not appear in all tracks that are not muted?
 * Bill: I disagree. In my view the editing cursor is distinct from the playback cursor. Editing operations happen at the cursor position or within a selection region, and the two should behave consistently.

Gale: Paste-to is the legitimate purpose IMO. It's analogous to regions (SHIFT - down arrow duplicates the cursor or region in the track). If we want to add the "play-from" or (equally important) "guideline" functions for multiple tracks, then the same cursors for both uses is confusing, and the lack of "play-from/guideline" regions is inconsistent. Bill 21Ap11: This is the "play-from" cursor, and it lives in the timeline. IMO it obviates the need for a play-from cursor in the tracks. The 1-pixel-wide vertical bar that lives in the tracks is the editing cursor. Gale: Some users have asked for the Timeline to be duplicated at the bottom of the TrackPanel. If so that adds weight to your argument. </ul></ul>
 * As a "paste-to" indicator, it should really be visible on all (and only) selected tracks.
 * As a "play-from" indicator, it should be visible on all (and only) non-muted tracks.
 * If the cursor is intended to indicate both "play-from" and "paste-to" positions, then it should show on all selected and all non-muted tracks.

In any case, if there is no selected track, then I think it would make sense for clipboard contents to be pasted at the cursor position on a new track.</ul>  Gale: That does happen now.  Steve: That's not happening here. What I'm seeing is that if there is no selected track the clipboard contents are pasted at the beginning of a new track and not at the cursor position. Gale: You're correct, I was reading that as "generated", which is done at the cursor position. Also if you cut a region not at time zero and paste to a new, empty project, it gets pasted at zero. I think it would be reasonable for both actions to do the same (paste at cursor). </ul></ul></ul>