Tracker UX improvements

[qm210]

As I am currently horsing around using the tracker a bit, I came to miss some possibilities that I wanted to suggest collectively here before raising several issues that might have cheap workarounds or are otherwise discussion-worthy first.

I was missing / asked myself about:

• an option just to playback the current note under the cursor (without pressing exactly the same note), or the current row, or the currently selected range (but then stopping when the end is reached)
• In Effect tracks
  • clicking on any cell always selects the Nibble already chosen, and I need the cursor keys to change that -- how about either making the click position more precise (note.go has a SetCursorFloat() that cares about the nibble, but it is never used), or to switch between the nibbles when clicking said cell again - or both?
  • a way to (linearly) interpolate in a range between two values, I remember some other trackers had that. quite useful.
  • Why actually can one not enter a "01", i.e. "02" is lowest?
• the Note Editor seems not to have any "insert row before current" or "delete row so the following ones move upward" functionality. the Order Editor has that via Ctrl + Return and Ctrl + Delete. would need to respect the pattern boundaries, of course, but support a purely keyboard-bound workflow
• selecting a Column in the Note Editor could switch the Instrument editor to the corresponding instrument, saving several needless clicks
• selecting a Unit in the Instrument Editor could make the scroll position jump to ensure that unit is actually visible

If some of these have issues already -- sorry, didn't see them at my very quick glance -- but if any of these become issues in the near future, I might find some time helping implementing them. 🙃

[vsariola]

Seems like I missed the notification for this discussion.

1. Enter could very well be that key, how does that sound to you?
2. The fact that correct nibble cannot be selected by clicking is a bug / "feature" and should just be fixed.
3. For the interpolation, I like the idea, but there starts to be quite a lot of rarely used buttons there. So maybe we should make a popup menu in the track editor with all the possible edit actions - perhaps even the "add semitone" and "subtract semitone" can be hidden there. And even the "play note under cursor" perhaps, so if there's some magic key to do that, the user would learn it by looking at the menu.
4. Values 0 and 1 have special meaning; 0 = release note, 1 = hold. If you type 0x01 there, it suddenly becomes empty aka hold, and 0x00 it becomes "release note". This is just how 4klang worked and I continued the tradition; there are size coding reasons for this in the player side.
5. "Insert row before current" and "delete row so the following ones move upward" are entirely possible to do; they might be a bit nonintuitive to users though as notes might disappear as they flow out of pattern boundaries, but perhaps it's all fine.
6. There is a minor problem with showing the instrument associated with the track, which is that there is not necessarily only one instrument associated with the track (it's rare, but it's possible). But maybe in that case it could show the first instrument only. What I'm worried about is though is that when the user selects a rectangle by dragging, the GUI goes wild as the different instrument flash in the instrument editor.
7. Ensuring that the unit is visible when selecting it in the mini list sounds definitely like a good idea.

[vsariola]

I added 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 as issues. 4 is probably "won't fix", and 5 is a bit fuzzy to me what exactly should be implemented (does adding a note in some mode push the rows downward? or is it just some key to insert empty row? what happens when the user has multiple cells selected? does it only affect the pattern below cursor or all the tracks that are selected?)