My personal belief for the long-term goal of Ardour is to become a pluggable timing/syncing infrastructure, where Ardour would provide their own “default” plugins/modules for the midi interface, etc, but then other organizations could provide (and sell) alternate modules. All they have to do is comply with Ardour’s API. That would be an interesting product.
I know as much as anyone how annoying it is when you’re putting fires out on your ship, and some bozo says “here’s how you should have made yer boat!” You are doing amazing work, and we appreciate it, and we are willing to pay for it. So don’t get too indignant at my suggestion. It’s all good.
This is not going to happen. Not because I’m opposed to it in principle, but because it ignores almost every aspect of the reality of developing software that does this sort of thing. You don’t just “drop in” an interface to do MIDI. If you want to do things like that, I suggest taking a look at something like VCV Rack. There are a couple of “full sequencers” for that environment that provide piano rolls and much more, but they are implemented as “just modules” within Rack.
You have a funny way of quoting people. We actually agree. What I was saying was to cherry pick the list editor from Cubase and then improve it. It’s just that there’s not much to cherry pick from other implementations.
There are unfortunately very few DAW makers that have bothered to implement a list editor. For example, Live, Bitwig, Reason, FL and Studio One do not have one.
Logic, DP and Reaper have one, which is more or less identical, with Reaper’s having a more readable design. These list editors are only the left half of Cubase’s.
The other half is what makes Cubase list editor really shines. It provides a visual representation of all MIDI events in a diagonally scrolling timeline. This makes their handling and positioning in relation to each other extremely intuitive and easy. Great for dealing with overlapping notes, for ordering CCs of different kinds, etc.
This thread is about “suggestions to improve MIDI workflow in Ardour.”
Regarding MIDI, Cubase is considered the gold standard by composers (e.g. those who work for film) and absolutely has to be scrutinised. There are plenty of good ideas to be had elsewhere (starting with Reason’s MIDI line automation), but it is the most comprehensive.
I’ll have a look at the video and will post a good screenshot of Cubase list editor.
Just because I’ve recently played around with ancient Atari MIDI software, and thus it was easy to do for me, here’s a screenshot showing the classic Atari Cubase 3.01 interface, in front the list editor window: You can add/edit MIDI messages there, via mouse or editing table contents, use display filters to unclutter the view, The vertical divider is movable, and the grid shows events sorted by their starting time.
I agree that looking at other software to understand what attracts users to them is the best approach.
I think one cool thing would be a Seq view along with Rec-Edit-Mix. Its button is hidden unless a MIDI track is selected. When a MIDI track is selected, you click on it and Ardour shows you a fully expanded piano roll for that MIDI track. Does not introduce any radical concepts, only uses existing ones, and improves usability a lot, IMHO!
Better still would be to ask MIDI composers/arrangers what they actually need. Most UIs I’ve worked with haven’t been great to be perfectly honest. Ableton Live’s lacklustre MIDI interface is the reason I’m playing with Ardour in the first place.
Press “f” (for “fill editor with selected tracks”)
result: fully expanded piano roll for that MIDI track
z to return to the previous state of things (this is the general purpose “visual undo” that can be used to undo several different kinds of changes in visual layout)
Your suggestion is great but it’s not obvious for many users who are used to clicking on things. The undo step is particularly hard (saying this as an Emacs user!). Perhaps f (fill)-f (return to previous state) would be more intuitive (the same key, f, act as a toggle).
It’s not a toggle with “f” because “z” is an undo for any visual change.
Which is great and consistent but requires some familiarity with the concept of modal editing, which most non-programmers don’t have.
My proposal for an f toggle is based on more common knowledge of UI. If you f a track which is not already maximized, it maximizes it. If you f a track which is already maximized, it rolls it back to the previous size. I guess you have to keep state for each track’s previous size, though.
(Not trying to be an armchair UX designer, just trying to be useful)
Okay, I did like a suggestion above to introduce a “SEQ” mode / button. We have rec, edit, mix currently. Why not simply put a fullscreen zoom to a midi event into a sequencing mode, which would prevent scrolling in tracks and instead scroll octaves, default to drawing for an empty event and to internal editing for an event that contains data already? Might be a more logical way to introduce this behaviour.
Well, pretty much have a look at the MIDI editor windows / screen areas of other DAWs for a bit of inspiration and just put some of it into that zoomed state. You would still have achieved the goal of not opening another window to edit, but you could offer the same convenience as similar software. This SEQ view could also get proper velocity editing with bars underneath the piano roll.
“f-as-toggle” cannot work if you toggle, then make some other change to the visual state. It only works if “f” initially takes you a sort of locked visual state (as @whitewolfmusic suggests below). It currently does not do that.
As a terminology matter, we have “regions”, not items. Double-click on an region is a way to access a dialog that allows you to edit the region metadata, not its contents.
As another terminology matter, Ardour does not (and likely will not) have a “Seq” view. We decided to adopt in-window editing a long time ago, and don’t see a major reason to abandon this. I don’t think that referring to something already accessible with specific commands as a new “view” is helpful. I understand that for users who expect to always work in a dedicated piano roll, some mechanism by which they can more easily discover a workflow that is closer to their expectations can be useful. But that’s a much more subtle thing that suggesting that this is really a new view/tab/mode/whatever.
Well, to me, composing / editing MIDI content inside a piano roll is a separate task, similar to recording audio, editing audio and mixing. As a task, a dedicated view mode makes sense, possibly with a set of more suitable editing tools and displayed information. This can be achieved the same way that currently is done with the other view modes, which would remain consistent in the context of Ardour’s UI. Plus, there is room for a fourth button:
You are doing amazing work, and we appreciate it, and we are willing to pay for it. So don’t get too indignant at my suggestion. It’s all good. 
