Middle mouse button to pan [CLOSED]

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hi.

I use both Gimp and Inkscape pretty much. Even that those programs is entirely different from Audacity, they have a nice little feature that I miss. When pressing down the middle button (scroll wheel is also a button on most mices) the user can pan the drawing area.
Of course there is not that kind of drawing area in an audio edition software like Audacity. But I think it would make much sense if it was possible to pan right/left on that way. And when there is a lot of tracs, it would make it possible to pan up and down too.

Just go try Gimp or Inkscape, and I think you’ll find this missing in Audacity.

Thanks :smiley:

2

Although you can’t “grab” the track in Audacity as you can in Gimp, you can use “Shift+Mouse Wheel” to scroll left/right, and “Ctrl+Mouse Wheel” to zoom in/out.

3

Hi. I know this.

But use mouse wheel to pan might be a painfully slow process compared to pan “directly”.

4

It’s not, it’s really fast. Zoom out to an appropriate zoom level first and you can scroll from start to end almost instantly.

You can also use these shortcuts:
Ctrl+F (zoom to fit)
Home (skip to start)
End (skip to end)
J (skip to Track start)
K (skip to Track end)

5

Going to bump this.
Is middle mouse still not usable for panning?
Is it planned?

6

No its not.
New features are listed in the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/new_features_in_this_release.html

No its not currently planned.

7

Please add it to the todo list. Any other audio software has this feature?

Reminder on panning topic: Big problem is that “Page Up” / “Page Down” keys moves the view by 100%. It should be 50-80% so that we always see the waveform continuity. This needs an option to set the percentage. Nudging back was suggested at previous time, but that is silly and tedious. A macro key for “Page Up + Nudge Back + Nudge Back” would work but…

8

I have logged the interest of people that have posted in this topic, for the feature:

“**Scroll with the middle-mouse button:**This should work like panning with the middle mouse button in Gimp, or panning in Google Maps, to make it easier to scroll in small amounts when working with long tracks.”

I’m going to close this topic now that all of the “votes” have been added.

For future reference proposals for new features should be posted to the “Adding Features” board. That helps the forum moderators to ensure that votes are added to the wiki “Feature Requests” page.

I would also note that the topic title was misleading. This topic is not about “panning” in the Audacity sense of the word, but is about “scrolling” / “Navigating the project”. Unfortunately it is too late to change it now as that would effectively “hide” the topic from you that have posted here.