[Ardour-Users] Copy / paste of timeline regions

[John Emmas]

On 20 Jul 2010, at 12:47, Paul Davis wrote:

> 
> i think that there are problems associated with both the current
> situation and your proposed rationalization. it would be interesting
> to try the idea you suggested. however, i'd warn you that its not
> going to appear in 2.X under any circumstances. basically, any use of
> a menu in combination with the position of the mouse cursor is
> fundamentally in conflict ....

Paul, since I wrote that I think I've come up with a better suggestion (just for consideration and kicking about).  It goes like this....

When I first looked at Ardour (circa 0.99) there used to be a blue edit cursor that appeared all over the place and was quite annoying because it looked a bit too similar to the Playhead cursor.  It's still around in 2.x but seems to have been muted a bit (I think it only ever attaches to location markers now - but I could be wrong).

Anyway, here's the idea...  along similar lines to the blue edit cursor, create a special blue location marker (assuming that blue isn't used for any other purpose).  Every time the user clicks or drags on the canvas, the blue marker gets moved to the current horizontal position - but it's "special" in the sense that it also records (invisibly) the corresponding y co-ordinate of the cursor.  If the cursor gets moved without being clicked or dragged, this blue marker will stay where it is, but retaining a record of the last click/drag position (and maybe this should include right-clicked positions as well).  The co-ordinates held by the blue marker are the co-ordinates used for "mouse mode" pasting operations.  So it won't matter if you need to physically move the mouse in order to invoke a menu.  All 3 paste operations will do the same thing.

Maybe the blue marker could even replace the blue edit cursor and be used for whatever that blue cursor gets used for at the moment.  I don't really know what it does get used for (except to indicate which is the "active" marker) so I could be way off beam with that one.  Anyway, food for thought?

John