Assigning actions to tags

[theGreatWhiteShark]

#1087 got me thinking. Maybe assigning actions to tags is an easy and convenient way to solve a number of open feature requests and in general might make Hydrogen more useful.

When playback passes a tag or transport is located into a column featuring a tag, all actions associated to the tag will be executed.

In terms of UI/UX it's a low hanging fruit. In version 1.3.0 most actions (things you can do using MIDI/OSC commands and a number of buttons) are exposed to the user anyway and can be bound to arbitrary shortcuts. In addition, I already planned to tweak the tag widgets to be more convenient (see #1807). For this feature all it would need is a right-click context menu or a dialog based way to toggle actions for a tag as well as adding them to the tooltip of the tag.

(I have to admit most of our current actions aren't very useful for this feature - like creating a new song, quit Hydrogen, add a tempo marker. But a number are - like toggling metronome or changing some instrument properties. In addition, the list of available actions will most probably grow)

@cme @trebmuh what do you think?

[theGreatWhiteShark]

I just realized that making tags trigger actions would basically give us (range) looping for free. We just assign the action "jump to column X". Hmm. I think already this would be worth the effort.

[theGreatWhiteShark]

I think the main problem is that such actions have to live and be triggered within the core. The song must not behave differently when played back via h2player. But this implies only a subset of actions is applicable. That's most fine since GUI actions like open menus are not very interesting for the timeline but requires us to think about a more clear visual representation of the difference between core and GUI actions.