Is there a way to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel without any key pressed and pan the region with the mouse wheel pressed, just like with any draw program or Reaper?
The default setting, scrolling up and down is not very useful for me
I’d like the ability to change the settings for this as well… here I am using shortkeys to 1s, 10s and 1 minute zoom functions using the keypad. I then use “z” to zoom out back to normal, but sometimes I just want to use the mouse wheel instead of needing to hold ctrl with it…
Mouse wheel with no keys pressed over the rulers in the edit window zooms in & out - maybe that’s useful?
Thanks for your help.
I’ll try the shortkeys hint.
Scrolling in the ruler area seems to have a better scroll ratio than wheeling in the timeline.
that’s true, but I don’t think this is what users normally would like to take if the user can do it quicker with just ctrl+mousewheel 
– they’ll not want to spend extra time bringing the pointer to the top of the window to do the same… I think this is a poor design for zoom/navigation control as most of the time is spent over the track area… it could also depend on workflow though.
the navigation timeline area(top-right) is another example – it can be used to do transport movement just by using the mousewheel — but the transport setting needs to be set to ‘follow playhead’ … I wonder how many people actually know about this other one…yet again how many people are willing to spend extra time bringing the pointer to the top-right corner just to do a transport movement when they can just use shift+mousewheel?
It’s also non-intuitive and hard to remember – mousewheel over the ruler == zoom, mousewheel over the navigation timeline == transport movement. This is very confusing and even impractical for certain workflows… there’s a great deal of keyboard shortcuts available but nothing for changing the meta_key+mousewheel settings.
@paul +staff : I don’t see why we users cannot have settings to manipulate the transport/zoom mousewheel bindings. Having just one workflow forcing users to hold ctrl is not particularly fitting as some of us want to use just the mousewheel without any metakeys.(while track-editing) – yet there is no way to change this… how come?
If I can propose a way to fix this, it would be to provide something like this in the user setup,
Mouse-wheel over Track Area, – as the title for a combo-pulldown setting
- Navigate transport + __ (+__ for keyboard option if the user wants to assign a meta key or not)
- Scroll tracks up and down + ___
There’s of course things like “zoom to mouse positions” but that still does not provide changing the meta key for the mousewheel…
I’d be delighted to know if this is to be implemented in the upcoming ardour6 release as here I tend to prefer using the mousewheel on occassion and not have to use the ctrl key everytime I need to perform a zoom function within track-editing. Mousewheel + no metakey == faster workflow.
to development: please reconsider the ability to change the binding for the mousewheel for the upcoming release of ardour – I’m pretty sure a good number of people would also be supportive to having this ability.
cheers
Making mouse operations “bindable” is an order of magnitude more complex than keyboard events. We’ve chosen not to do it thus far. Maybe even two orders of magnitude more complex.
If you don’t understand why, consider that the minimum basic unit of mouse activity is a press followed by an optional drag followed by a release.
The claim that zoom is used far more often than scroll is untested. It’s true that when displaying a single track, zoom would likely be a better interpretation for scroll events. But when viewing multiple tracks, I don’t know that there’s any evidence to suggest that zoom is more prevalent/desirable than scroll.
well son-of-a-gun, I never asked about adding bindable drag-operations as that would be requesting new mountains of code!!
Basically enabling/disabling the requirement to use the clt key for the editing area, and having a restrictive “track head” space to still have its own mousewheel facility of doing “scroll tracks up/down”.
I don’t see how this can be overkill for just disabling the “ctrl” key for this one simple notion of having the same thing just as in the ruler area.
There is nothing I mentioned about drag/dropping even going with the mousewheel as a button…
I think you don’t want to bother with it because you’re afraid of ardour to becoming so much better. 
thanks for the feedback but I don’t believe the honesty of your explanation and it sounds very well recited from users who are asking for “too much”. And here I’m certainly not asking for that much!!
please reconsider! 
Just a gentle reminder, make sure you are responding to issues raised and commenting on them, not on the people responding to the issues raised. I will draw a line at the latter.
SeabladeI remember being slightly disappointed many years ago that in Ardour 3 there was no longer anywhere in the editor where unmodified scroll wheel would scroll the editor left/right - https://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=5007
The argument against it back then was that this would be inconsistent, but I think enough has changed since then that whatever consistency existed at the time has long since eroded. I’d vote for at least reviewing the modifier+scroll wheel bindings before A6.