Please Improve How Values Can be Modified

I'm new to Fusion, and I'm liking many things... and others, well not so much.

Most glaring and frustrating are significant limitations on how values are manipulated. The following additions would make Fusion quicker to use and be a big step towards bringing Fusion's UI to what we've grown to expect from other apps.

1. Ability to drag left or right over any number to decrease/increase its value (regardless of if that number also has a slider or onscreen control).

2. Ability to decrement/increment any number using the mouse's scroll wheel and/or keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Down Arrow and Up Arrow.

3. Ability to modify the above two behaviors to make them less or more precise. E.g. holding Shift makes the incremental movement less fine, holding Ctrl makes the incremental movements more fine.

Bryan Ray's Post below explains how to currently do this.
4. Ability to directly enter a value via only the keyboard without automatically moving to the next control. (Presently you have to press either Enter or Tab for a value change to take effect, but pressing either Tab or Enter always moves focus to the next control.) E.g. pressing Enter (or maybe Numeric Pad Enter) keeps focus on the currently selected control, pressing Tab moves focus to the next control.


5. Ability to enter a + or - and vale to increment or decrement the value by a set amount. And pressing Enter would repeat the process. E.g. +.5 would increase the currently selected value of 10 by .5, resulting in the value of 10.5 . And pressing Enter would again increase the value by .5, so the value would now be 11. And pressing Enter again would increase the value to 11.5, and so on.

I very much appreciate the *tremendous* value and power that Fusion offers. I do think these suggestions are additions that many users would welcome.

Thank you so much.

4. Ability to directly enter a value via only the keyboard without automatically moving to the next control. (Presently you have to press either Enter or Tab for a value change to take effect, but pressing either Tab or Enter always moves focus to the next control.) E.g. pressing Enter (or maybe Numeric Pad Enter) keeps focus on the currently selected control, pressing Tab moves focus to the next control.

That one's in the Preferences. In the User Interface category, uncheck "Auto control advance."

3. Ability to modify the above two behaviors to make them less or more precise. E.g. holding Shift makes the incremental movement less fine, holding Ctrl makes the incremental movements more fine.

This is already the case. Only the other way around

shift + left/right = larger steps
ctrl + left/right = smaller steps

As for 2)

You can manipulate with right/left arrows, not the scroll wheel, which would be cool.

Sander, thanks so much for your reply. I didn't realize that Fusion already uses Ctrl and Shift to modify the incrementation, and Left and Right Arrow to change values.

But the problem is that these only work with values that have sliders. Some don't, e.g. Center X. And when you press Tab, you move to the next value box, not to the next slider. So you have to move to the mouse to click on the next slider. It would be nice to be able to use Ctrl and Shift when incrementing the value box.

Also Ctrl and Shift don't seem to do anything when manipulating an onscreen control. For example, if I move the onscreen control to change Center X and Center Y, holding Shift or Ctrl does not affect how quickly or slowly the image moves/its values change.

It does with for example the transform tool. Click (or activate) the center control and use the arrows to move the center. Shift makes the steps larger, ctrl smaller. Here it works with up and down, right and left for the direction. Shift and control influence this in the same way as with sliders/spinners.

Sander, you are right that Ctrl and Shift do work when the control is selected with the mouse and then its values changed using the arrow keys.

But Ctrl and Shift don't work when using just the mouse. I.e. when you move the mouse, Ctrl and Shift have no influence on how finely or coarsely the object you are moving moves.

It is helpful that Ctrl and Shift work with arrow keys, but you first have to use the mouse to select the onscreen control.

It would be nice to be able to:

1. Click on or Tab over to any value itself (not its slider or onscreen control) and be able to use Up and Down Arrow to increment and decrement the value. And use Shift and Ctrl to increase or decrease the step value.

2. Click and move any onscreen control with the mouse and have Shift or Ctrl change how quickly/finely the object moves when moving the mouse. For example, in Avid's color corrector if you hold down a modifier key, the color wheel values change more slowly when you move the mouse. So if you select the color wheel's control point and move the mouse a centimeter, the control point itself will only move about 1/2 a centimeter. If you don't hold down a modifier key, then the control point will move in the normal one-to-one relationship with the mouse.

Thanks again for all of your help!

I rather like the way Nuke does it, where if you're in a numeric field, the up/down arrows change the digit your cursor is on. So if you place it right before the decimal, up will add a whole integer. If you put the cursor behind the number right after the decimal, up will add 0.1.

I'm not generally one to say "Nuke does it better," but in this case it's true.

Oh, one exception to the modifiers: A Range control, like the Trim In/Out on a Loader, work differently. I don't think Shift does anything at all, and Ctrl adjusts both ends of the Range in opposite directions.

I don't know if this is the case here, but sometimes UI behavior like this can be patented as well.
Years ago something else or similar was requested for Fusion and it couldn't be done because some program Autodesk owned, already had that.