Pavane -

One program that I liked a lot (but which unfortunately won't run on my new XP machine) let you use 1=whole, 2=half, 3=quarter, 4=eight, 5=16th, 6=32d, 7=64th, 8=128th notes. Hitting "D" made the selection a dotted note, and hitting "T" made it a "tuplet" at the default triplet value. The "D" and "T" were as toggles, so that hitting one again turned off that choice. In that program, changing the note duration also turned off dot or tuplet, so that you had to reselect to apply them to the new note value. This is probably more efficient than leaving them on through a note selection, since triplet eighths are seldom adjacent to triplet quarters, and dotted quarters are frequently adjacent to single undotted eighths, etc.

The same choices were available by clicking on a toolbar to make the selections, but the "quick keys," turned on if you selected an input mode, and were much quicker and easier to use, once you got the right ones into your head.

I don't know for sure how the "innards" of this feature were implemented, but the quick keys were generally "on" and turned off only when you selected a "text entry" mode. The program had a separate Lyric input mode, a generic Text mode for annotations, and a few "special notation" selections like the addition of a text note to a D.S. or other standard sign.

Probably not of immediate interest, but quick-keys were also useful for mode selection, where "T" selected text, "L" selected lyrics, "C" selected insert chords, and "G" insert graphics (generally Guitar fret diagrams, plus a few others). (When you used a "mode select" key, the display also swapped to the toolbar for that mode, so you could click if you didn't remember a toolbar-specific key.)

Users will probably never get to the keyboard shortcuts if you don't have the icon click means of running the program. A certain level of familiarity, from using the program a bit, seems to be a requirement to get a user interested enough to look for the "efficiency" features. People won't RTFM first.

John