Shortcuts with ALT on Mac

[Gale Andrews]

<<<recent builds from CVS>>> We assume not the American {word rejected} (chemist) chain?

Well, I suppose they might be selling it as a way to increase your blood pressure, if anyone needs to do that ...

<<<shortcuts don't work until you do something with the mouse.>>>
Can you post the original complaint? That's a little vague, even for a right-brain Mac user.

It was a Linux user. To be exact , he said:

in 1.3.7 (cvs a few days ago) keyboard shortcuts don't seem to initialize until something is done, e.g. press the play button with the mouse.

So, really it amounts to much what you were saying, I guess just control-clicking would not help. It sounds as if the main window thinks it hasn't got focus or something like that. Let me know.

Thanks

Gale

[kozikowski]

I think the 1.3.7 (Mac) Play module is scrambled.

Open up a fresh Audacity and sound clip. Click anywhere in the thin time band on top and the clip will start to play from that point (certainly different from 1.2.5).

Open up a fresh Audacity and a sound clip. Spacebar does nothing. Play button plays.

Open up a fresh Audacity and sound clip. Click anywhere in the active (dark gray) waveform and work area and the sound clip becomes highlighted (thin yellow band around it) and the spacebar will play the clip.

Open up a fresh Audacity and sound clip. Play button plays. Clip remains un-highlighted, but the spacebar starts working.

I'm sure there are other variations, but you get the idea.

Koz

[kozikowski]

<<<if anyone needs to do that ... >>>

That would be redundant, wouldn't it?

,,,Shortcuts don't work>>>

Launch Audacity and open a sound file. APPLE-A will select the whole track. Spacebar still doesn't work.

Just to cover all the bases, on a Mac you can get a graphic effect of the program "exploding" out of the application file when you double click on it. That works in 1.2.5, but in 1.3.7, it explodes twice.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

I think the 1.3.7 (Mac) Play module is scrambled. Open up a fresh Audacity and sound clip. Click anywhere in the thin time band on top and the clip will start to play from that point (certainly different from 1.2.5).

That's known as Quick-Play and not actually a bug:
http://www.audacityteam.org/manual/inde ... e=Timeline

Open up a fresh Audacity and a sound clip. Spacebar does nothing. Play button plays. Open up a fresh Audacity and sound clip. Click anywhere in the active (dark gray) waveform and work area and the sound clip becomes highlighted (thin yellow band around it) and the spacebar will play the clip. Open up a fresh Audacity and sound clip. Play button plays. Clip remains un-highlighted, but the spacebar starts working.Launch Audacity and open a sound file. APPLE-A will select the whole track. Spacebar still doesn't work.

Thanks Koz. When you just import a file, the track should be highlighted with the yellow border, so things aren't right there, irrespective of spacebar not playing until you click somewhere.

Gale

[kozikowski]

<<<That's known as Quick-Play and not actually a bug:>>>

Which is why I didn't call it a bug. I just said 1.2.5 didn't do that. That saves an enormous number of keystrokes when you're looking for a segment. "That's not it, no, no, shucks, not here, there it is!" Why, it's almost as good as scrubbing (hint, hint).

So it's missing one or two characteristics of a bug; It's not inherently evil and it does not destroy or damage the work. Apparently, this effect is not accidental. It is true, however, that multiple people on different machines can reproduce the effect at will.


But it does seem that an odd series of assumptions were made when Macs open a fresh file.

Koz

[ENowlan]

Longer term we're aiming to tidy up our shortcuts and make them more consistent where possible. Can someone confirm if shortcuts with ALT will work on Mac - e.g. Split New (CMND + ALT + I). I presume they won't, because ALT is not a shortcut modifier on Mac. I assume of course that the shortcut appears in the menu as COMMAND+ ALT + I because of the translation from CTRL (as it appears on Windows and Linux) to COMMAND.

Thanks

Gale

For What it is worth, the Control, Alt/Option, Apple/Command keys have been on all Macs going back to at least the Apple LC II in 1993. Mac users used the Cmd+S to save a document, whereas PC users used Ctrl+S and similar parallelism for the other operations. However the Ctrl and Alt keys were able to be used to define other shortcuts.

Gale, we recently discussed the following on the Yahoo group. When Mac users edit Keyboard shortcuts their preferences do not always get saved as expected. E. g. if I cleared Cmd+S and replaced it with Ctrl+S and click on OK it does not stick and when I come back to edit the key bindings in preferences it is Cmd+S again. If I had set it to Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+S it would now read Cmd+Alt+Cmd+S.

I'm really disappointed that the Audacity developers have decided to not respect Mac standards. Cmd+S is Save, Cmd+D is duplicate, Cmd+P is Print. I recently tried editing the keybinding file and found no occurrence of Cmd- they had all been changed to Ctrl. However, back in the preferences window all those Ctrls now are Cmd which means that any original Ctrls have become Cmds.

The most obvious frustration is trying to place a label on a track while it is recording at the recording position. Macs have a universal shortcut across all applications to minimize the application. The image shrinks to nothing as it sweeps to the lower right corner of the monitor where we have a dock. The latest version of Audacity beta does put a label at the proper spot. Now the trick is to click on the icon in the dock to bring the application up for further use.

Here is the problem- when Audacity changes all Cmd keys to Ctrl we can no longer uniquely define Ctrl+M to add a label at the current position. So we have lost a convenient function. When it comes to Macs and shortcuts someone did some serious back peddling with the latest, or was it the previous version?

[kozikowski]

And back to experimental 1.3.7 for a second.

I loaded my short piano thing and tried to select a single note (G below middle C) to prove a point to someone. I couldn't do it. After seemingly possessed behavior, I saw that the click and drag selector only worked in even seconds. It would snap to the integer closest to where I clicked. 1, 2, 3. There doesn't seem to be anywhere in Preferences to turn that off.

I would like to suggest that should not be default behavior.

Koz

[kozikowski]

After the keystroke posting above, I'm in the group that expects to shift keys between the platforms. I don't expect CONTROL-C to copy anything on the Macs.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

And back to experimental 1.3.7 for a second. I loaded my short piano thing and tried to select a single note (G below middle C) to prove a point to someone. I couldn't do it. After seemingly possessed behavior, I saw that the click and drag selector only worked in even seconds. It would snap to the integer closest to where I clicked. 1, 2, 3. There doesn't seem to be anywhere in Preferences to turn that off. I would like to suggest that should not be default behavior.

You've lost me here. Is this something to do with Effect > Change Pitch? If you are going from one note to another then that is a whole semitone - can you explain in more detail? And unless sliders are to be the width of three screens, they can't operate in thousandths of a unit. Is that what you mean?


Gale

[Gale Andrews]

When Mac users edit Keyboard shortcuts their preferences do not always get saved as expected. E. g. if I cleared Cmd+S and replaced it with Ctrl+S and click on OK it does not stick and when I come back to edit the key bindings in preferences it is Cmd+S again. If I had set it to Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+S it would now read Cmd+Alt+Cmd+S.

I'm really disappointed that the Audacity developers have decided to not respect Mac standards. Cmd+S is Save, Cmd+D is duplicate, Cmd+P is Print. I recently tried editing the keybinding file and found no occurrence of Cmd- they had all been changed to Ctrl. However, back in the preferences window all those Ctrls now are Cmd which means that any original Ctrls have become Cmds.....

The most obvious frustration is trying to place a label on a track while it is recording at the recording position. Macs have a universal shortcut across all applications to minimize the application. The image shrinks to nothing as it sweeps to the lower right corner of the monitor where we have a dock. The latest version of Audacity beta does put a label at the proper spot. Now the trick is to click on the icon in the dock to bring the application up for further use.

Here is the problem- when Audacity changes all Cmd keys to Ctrl we can no longer uniquely define Ctrl+M to add a label at the current position. So we have lost a convenient function. When it comes to Macs and shortcuts someone did some serious back peddling with the latest, or was it the previous version?

First, some background. We currently have no active developers on Mac. Most of the other developers are on Windows and know just about nothing about Mac. I am not on a Mac either, but I have always tried to take an interest in it, hence my attempt to gather information in this thread given the position we're in. You'll recall also that you discussed this with me on the Audacity users' list, but we did not really finish the discussion.

Regarding COMMAND-S being Save and so on, if you initialise the Preferences you will see in the File Menu I believe that Save Project actually is COMMAND-S. We handle this by having no COMMAND shortcuts in the source code (hence there are none in the key bindings file you export), but let the wxMac GUI library we use translate the CTRL shortcuts in our code to COMMAND.

In our users' list discussion I asked you two questions:

what is stopping you in 1.3.6 binding Add Label at Playback Position to CTRL + M, and didn't CMD + M minimise 1.3.3 too?

If you don't change the bindings then CMD + S should save a project and S should stop playback/recording. If you make Stop to be CTRL + S, are you saying CMD + S then no longer saves?

Now, until I started this thread with Koz, I did not even know that (for example) CONTROL-ALT-I also performed Edit > Split New as well as ALT-COMMAND-I, which is the shortcut actually alongside the menu item. It sounds as if this behaviour, where equivalent COMMAND and CONTROL shortcuts do the same thing, might be the crux of the current problem. However I don't understand why this changed after 1.3.3, because I'm not aware of us changing anything significant that might affect this. So, you are quite sure in 1.3.3 that when you initialise Preferences:

(a) CTRL + M has no effect

(b) when you go to the keyboard preferences and change COMMAND - M to CTRL + M, you can then use CTRL + M to add a label at playback position ?

Can you re-check this in 1.3.3 now with your *present* version of OS X? This is important, because new versions of OS X can and often do break things. Here is 1.3.3.

But even now, I assume you can make that labelling shortcut to be "M" can't you, and it works?

The only thing that is going through my mind at present is to hard code all the Mac CTRL shortcuts to Command, but I really don't know if that would work with wxMac or not at the moment. But for now, can you comment on the above for me?

Thanks


Gale