The editing capabilities of WeTracker continue to evolve, as I endeavour to provide the tools needed to be efficient as a tracker tool. This recent change introduces cut&paste, or more accurately right now, copy&paste.

Supporting this feature is another new capability that will be expanded upon in the coming releases, the ability to mark a region of the data in the pattern editor. There has always been the concept of a current cursor in the pattern editor, displayed as a green marker on the item that it marks. Now this concept has been expanded to allow you to effectively ‘hold’ the cursor, and move it resulting in a region being highlighted. This is achieved by moving to where you want to start marking the region using the cursor keys as normal, then pressing and holding shift and moving the cursor to the end point of the region to be selected. The cursor can be moved in any direction from the start point, the system copes with backwards/upwards motion fine. The total region will be highlighted with a semi-transparent green rectangle.

Once you have selected your region of the pattern, pressing CTRL+C/CMD+C will copy the contents of that region into an internal buffer. You can then move to anywhere in the pattern and press CTRL+V/CMD+V to paste the contents. The copy and paste operations are intelligent enough to know where in the tracks the data comes from and only paste where it is appropriate. This means, for example, you can copy rows from the FX column, then move to any other track, or anywhere else in the same track, and press CTRL+V/CMD+V and the data will paste into the FX column starting from that row, in that track, no need to move the cursor to the FX column to paste.

When copying and pasting, if the region doesn’t include all elements of an event, i.e. note, instrument, volume, and FX, the missing parts will not be modified when pasting. If however, the region includes those elements but they are empty, when pasting, any data in those elements in the target region will be replaced with empty elements. This allows you to exactly copy and paste regions, including empty data, or copy and paste just certain parts of the pattern.

The screen capture below shows some of the features described above in action. Astute readers will also notice that undo works fine with cut&paste too.

Onwards and upwards…