Moving around
The caret is battuta’s answer to “where am I?”. It is not a pixel position but a
place in the document: measure, staff, voice, event. The status bar spells it
out — [ m 10, s 2, v 1, n 6 ] — and the blue highlight in the score shows the
event it sits on.
Placing the caret
Section titled “Placing the caret”Click a note, rest or chord. Clicking a chord puts the caret on the whole chord, even if you hit one of its noteheads. Clicking a slur, a barline or a staff line lands on the closest event in that measure instead, so you rarely have to aim precisely.
Walking through the music
Section titled “Walking through the music”| Keys | Action | Applies |
|---|---|---|
| ←→↑↓ | caret: events / voices / staves / lines | any timefixed |
| Home End PgUp PgDn | row start / end · previous / next row | any timefixed |
← and → step event by event through the caret’s voice and cross measure boundaries as if the barlines weren’t there. They stop at the voice’s own start and end: a second voice that only exists in measures 5–8 does not teleport you to measure 1.
↑ and ↓ move vertically through the slots in the measure — voice 1, voice 2, then the next staff’s voices — and when the slots run out they continue to the adjacent row of the score, entering at its top slot going down and its bottom slot coming up, landing on the note nearest the caret’s horizontal position. That is exactly how a text cursor behaves at the end of a line.
Home / End jump to the first or last event of the engraved row you are on. PageUp / PageDown move to the previous or next row, keeping your staff and voice where the landing measure has them.
The view follows the caret
Section titled “The view follows the caret”When navigation or note entry pushes the caret past the edge of the window, the score scrolls it back to the middle, smoothly, clearing the sticky header and the status bar. Re-layout, zoom changes and background tile renders never scroll the view — only an actual caret move does.
If the caret lands in a measure that hasn’t been rendered yet (large scores render lazily), battuta scrolls to its place, which triggers the render, and the caret appears as soon as the tile exists.
ctrl + + / ctrl + − zoom in and out in 25 % steps from 50 % to 250 %; ctrl + 0 returns to 100 %. The same steps are behind the zoom button in the status bar. Your zoom level is remembered between sessions, and new documents open at it.
The browser’s own page zoom is suppressed on these keys — in battuta they always mean the score.
Clearing state
Section titled “Clearing state”esc drops any selection and any block. In note input mode, esc first leaves input mode (press it again to clear a selection).
Between the two views
Section titled “Between the two views”The caret is drawn in edit view. Switching to page view keeps the position — it is stored in the document, not on screen — so you can proofread a passage, come back, and carry on typing where you were.
- Selection — extending from the caret into runs and blocks.
- Note entry — what the letter keys do once input mode is on.