Hello, audacitizens. Context: I’m using Audacity 3.7.1 in Ubuntu 24.04 as a self-contained app (or “.AppImage”). This post is a suggestion for further improvement of Audacity.
When Audacity is zoomed out, a short length clip tends to become very thin in the interface, making it impossible to grab and move around with the hand tool:
audacity understands that the top bar of the clip (where the clip’s name is written) needs to be wide enough for the cursor to actually switch to the hand tool (needed for grabbing and moving the clip). Instead, the cursor changes to the bracket icons “[” and “]”, that are meant to shrink or expand the clip.
The only way around this is to zoom in again, make the clip’s top bar wide enough so that Audacity understands it can be dragged with the hand tool, and finally dragging the clip. I find this to be a limitation because of the need to zoom in and out very frequently in so many situations.
I suggest a change of priority on what cursor to display when a clip is very thin. Instead of displaying the brackets icons, display the hand tool first. Or at least allow the user to set up this as a preference (this might be clumsier to implement though).
This suggestion is based in my experience with Kdenlive app, a video editor for Ubuntu, that behaves exactly like what I described above, and I find it more useful.