How to join the project?

[ryanpmcguire]

edit: I may have been too critical in my initial post. I should reiterate that the UI concept is incredible, and this software has great potential to become the best midi sequencer available. I am truly overjoyed that this thing has been written in such a thoughtful, detailed, organized way.

Hello. I really like this sequencer. For years I have been searching for "the perfect sequencer", but couldn't find anything. Just two days ago I discovered Helio, and was overjoyed to see that it was open source. After finally getting it to build, I made my own tweaks and am even planning on clearing up the functions governing user interaction in pianoRoll.cpp and rollBase.cpp.

I noticed a few very strange UI/UX decisions that I felt needed to be corrected. Here are the fixes I made for myself and am now using in my own version of the software:

• reduced contrast between light and dark keys

• made a new color theme that mimics the appearance of adobe Photoshop.

• raw scroll now pans horizontally

• crtl+scroll now zooms horizontally

• shift+scroll now zooms vertically

• alt+scroll now zooms globally

• removed the edit mode/pen mode distinction (we have enough modifier keys and mouse buttons to include all the features of edit mode in pen mode without much difficulty or confusion).

• mouseDown+leftButtonDrag now begins selection lasso even in pen mode (i have yet to entirely remove edit mode)

• mouseDown+middleMouseButton drag now pans (without placing a note in pen mode). (user can still space click)

• right button now dedicated to deleting notes

these are some of the changes i made for myself. If I could make some commits to the main git, i would probably clean up my code and make the mouse clicking behavior editable via the keybinds json.

some additional features i want to add:

• crtl+right click starts a "draw bounds" lasso compared to the regular rectangle one
• crtl+shift+stretch on a note selection stretches the selection while also adjusting the position of neighboring notes to accommodate
• cleaner velocity view
• automation control
• ctrl+insert inserts a blank space into the selected time, displacing notes to the right of the insertion.
• ctrl+delete removes the selected time, contracting notes to the right of the insertion.

my down the line wishlist:

• ability to have tempo reflected in the length of bars and midi notes
• ability to drag the length of bars, therefore changing the tempo of that particular section.

I think our goals of making this "the perfect midi sequencer" are both very much in line. Thanks for doing the brunt of the work on this so I could come along and make my own tweaks.

[peterrudenko]

Thank you!

I believe that all UI behavior tweaks should be made easily customizable, without even having to edit your own hotkeys scheme. For example, this can already be set without fixing the code:

• raw scroll now pans horizontally
• crtl+scroll now zooms horizontally
• shift+scroll now zooms vertically

Check the Use mouse wheel for panning by default box in the settings page. Although it will use ctrl+shift+scroll for vertical zoom this way, not shift+scroll (which will be vertical pan), because it's a more common convention that shift changes direction, not the mode - see #177.

Similarly, right click to delete notes should be made optional, toggled with a checkbox in UI options.

The edit mode/pen mode distinction exists because of the mobile platforms, where you don't have modifier keys. But I agree that they should have more in common on the desktop.

reduced contrast between light and dark keys

This should probably be made a separate theme, I can clearly remember someone asking for greater contrast

If I could make some commits to the main git

I cannot grant you access to master/develop branches directly, because this way I will effectively share my production codesign certificates and RSA keys (they are all encrypted in the repo, but CI pipelines are able to decrypt them to sign and deploy; anyone who can push a commit in the main branches is able to dump their decryption keys in the console, etc), and sharing the private key of a code sign certificate kinda defeats the point of having a code sign certificate :)

Consider creating separate PR's with incremental changes, so they can be addressed one by one, for example: adding the right click to delete notes UI option (it would resolve #65 btw), unifying the mode/pen modes, implementing a "draw bounds" lasso, and so on.

And, again, thanks for sharing some really cool ideas here. If you don't have time to mess with PRs, I think I will eventually implement at least some of these myself (no ETAs though).