Once a score is open, it is displayed in the main area of the screen. 

 

To navigate in the working space:

• Right-click anywhere in the working space and drag the content around.
• Use the mouse wheel for vertical motion (SHIFT + mouse wheel for horizontal motion).
• To zoom in and out, right-click anywhere in the working space and while holding down the right mouse button, use the mouse wheel. You can combine dragging the score around and zooming. The mouse location keeps the same location in the score. This makes it quite easy to navigate only with the mouse, with no need for keyboard shortcuts. You can also use the standard CTRL+mouse wheel to zoom in/out.
• You can navigate the score with the keyboard arrow keys combined with the ALT key.  It moves the score by small steps.
• The Home and End keys will respectively navigate to the beginning and end of the score.
• The Page Up and Page Down keys will navigate vertically by a distance close to the visible view height.
• CTRL and + will increase the zoom value.
• CTRL and - will decrease the zoom value.

 

The following icons help the navigation and are found to the right, above the score:

•   Decreases the zoom level (zoom out)
•   Increases the zoom level (zoom in)
•   Toggles full-screen mode

 

---

The highlighted object

• When moving the mouse over the score, the closest object is automatically highlighted:

                                    

• The highlighted color of an object is a message to the user, saying “Here I am, you can click me!”
• There is only one highlighted object at any given time. If the mouse is too far away from an object, there is no highlighted object.

 

---

The selected object(s)

• The selection tool is the default tool, active when no other tool is used. Its shortcut is ESC.

This shortcut will also:

• Disable the current tool.
• Disable the entry cursor.
• Disable the duration dot tool.
• Set the current note entry layer to 1.
• Disable the tuplet tool.
• Cancel any object selection.
  • Note that if you work in full-screen mode, Chrome may interpret the ESC key as a request to exit the full-screen mode, so Compose won’t react to it and will need a second ESC key to react properly.
• To select an object, click on it.
• Most objects (notes, clefs, time signatures, bar lines, key signatures, text symbols, chord symbols, endings, rehearsal marks, metronome, ...) will display their property panel on the left side of the screen when they are selected. This is where you can modify the properties of these objects.
• Selected objects are displayed as follows:

                 

• There can be one or more objects selected.
• The same object can be selected AND highlighted if the mouse is close to a selected object, even though the graphic selected status overbears the highlighted status.
•  The arrow keys help you change which object is selected.  Left and right arrows will respectively select the note/rest that is to the left or right of the currently selected note.  Up and Down arrows can be used to select the upper / lower note in a chord, but also select symbols attached to the note.  For instance, in the following case, using the Up arrow key would successively select the accent, the staccato dot, the C note, the F note, the A note and finally the slur:

 

 

 

Guidelines:

• Copy the information from Compose User Guide [Support team copy 2025.06.05]
  • Tailor wording to better fit the format (if needed)
• Provide links to other articles and functions where appropriate
• Use Heading 2 if there are sub-sections to the article.
• Use <hr> tag in HTML to create horizontal lines after sub-sections. See below:

  ---