In the previous installment, we looked at Dorico’s Jump Bar — the floating command launcher you summon with J and use to find and execute virtually any command in the program. At the end of that article, I mentioned that Sibelius has its own counterpart: Command Search.
If you’ve looked at the top-right corner of Sibelius’s Ribbon and seen a small search field there, you’ve already met Command Search — you may just not have introduced yourself yet. That changes here.
A brief history of the search box
Command Search didn’t arrive fully formed. It has an evolutionary history worth knowing, because understanding where it came from helps explain what it’s capable of today. Shall we go down memory lane?
The search field in that corner of the Ribbon dates back to Sibelius 7, where it was called Find in Ribbon. Its original purpose was modest: help users who’d been living in Sibelius 6’s menus find their footing in the new Ribbon interface. It did what it said — typing a term highlighted the corresponding Ribbon location — but it didn’t actually run anything. You’d still need to click the item after finding it.
The next step came in Sibelius 2018.1, when the feature was re-imagined as a proper command launcher. Now clicking (or pressing Return on) a search result would execute the command directly, not just point at it. Progress — but coverage was still incomplete. The Ribbon was searchable, and some plug-ins, but much of Sibelius’s functionality remained out of reach.
The transformation into something more powerful happened with Sibelius 2021.2, when the feature was renamed Command Search and given vastly expanded scope. I reviewed that release in depth when it came out and spent a good amount of time on what this meant in practice: suddenly, commands from the Keypad, the File tab, the Inspector, and the Add or Remove Instruments dialog were all available from that same search field. The command launcher had finally become comprehensive.
Press comma to begin
To invoke Command Search, press the comma key (,). (You can also click directly in the box.) Once Command Search is active, start typing. Matching commands appear in a dropdown below the search field, getting more refined as you type.
Navigate the results with the Up and Down arrow keys, and press Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac) to execute the selected command. Click with the mouse if you prefer.
Press Escape to close without doing anything.
If for some reason the comma key conflicts with something in your setup, you can assign a different shortcut: go to File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts > Other > Activate Command Search and define your own. It’s a reasonable escape hatch, though most users will be fine with the comma.
What Command Search can find
The scope is worth spelling out, because it’s broader than it might appear.
Command Search covers essentially anything you’d find listed in File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts — which is to say, nearly all of Sibelius. Every Ribbon command across all tabs. Every Keypad item, including all five Keypad layouts. Everything in the Inspector. Commands from the Add/Remove Instruments dialog. And — crucially — any plug-in installed in Sibelius, whether it’s a first-party Avid plug-in or a third-party plug-in you’ve installed yourself.
That last point matters more than it might seem. Sibelius has one of the richest plug-in ecosystems in notation software, built up over decades by developers including the prolific Bob Zawalich and many others in the community. Command Search gives you instant access to all of them without submenus. If you know the name — or even part of the name — you’re one comma and a few keystrokes away.
A specific example worth highlighting from the 2021.2 update: commands like Add Staff Above, Add Staff Below, Move Instruments Up, and Move Instruments Down — which previously required navigating into the Instruments dialog — became directly invocable from Command Search. And because they function as multi-edit commands (yes, I’m talking to you, if you haven’t upgraded Sibelius in the last decade), they work on each selected staff. That’s not a minor convenience; it can fundamentally change how you handle score editing.
The key signature trick
Here is a capability that Command Search has and Dorico’s Jump Bar does not: you can type a key signature’s name directly and apply it.
Type G major and you’ll see G major in the results. Type bb and Return and there’s a B♭ major key signature instantly applied in your score.
No mousing to the Notations tab, no navigating a dialog — press comma, type the key name, press Return.
It’s a glimpse of what Command Search could become with further development — something closer to an über-popover that understands musical vocabulary directly. In my 2021 review, I raised the wish that you could eventually enter Dorico-style symbols directly (imagine typing || for a double barline, |: for a start repeat, or /// for a three-stroke tremolo), and the key signature feature feels like a step in that direction. Whether that full vision arrives is still an open question, but as a starting point it’s a distinctive capability worth knowing about.
Discovering what’s there: the Commands Gallery
If you want to see the full scope of what Command Search can reach, there’s a browsable companion: the Commands Gallery, accessible at Home > Commands in the Ribbon.
The Gallery shows every command available to Command Search, organized alphabetically by category — Ribbon tab location, Keypad layouts, Moving, Zoom, Selection, and so on. Assigned keyboard shortcuts appear alongside each command in the list. You can filter by category to make the list less overwhelming, and there’s a search field within the Gallery itself for when you want to browse rather than execute.
You won’t spend much time in the Gallery once you’re comfortable with Command Search, but it’s invaluable for discovery. When you have nothing better to do, scroll through it and — along with the hours of harmless (if rather limited) enjoyment such an endeavor will provide — you’ll almost certainly find commands you didn’t know existed. Truly, it’s the kind of thing you’d have hunted through submenus for, or simply not known to look for.
Command Search on mobile
Sibelius’s reach now extends well beyond the desktop. As Sam Butler told me at NAMM 2026, there are “many, many more people who are just on mobile” than on desktop — millions of devices running Sibelius on iOS, iPadOS, Android, and Chromebook, with about 95% of the code shared across all those platforms. That cross-platform presence is remarkable, and it shapes the role Command Search plays in ways that aren’t obvious from the desktop alone.
Sibelius’s mobile versions are deliberately streamlined. Where Dorico’s iPad version offers on-screen controls that closely mirror the desktop experience, Sibelius for mobile takes a different approach: the interface is pared down significantly, with the Ribbon either hidden or simplified depending on the context. The Sibelius Reference itself notes that Command Search “lets you quickly execute commands even when the Ribbon is hidden” — and on mobile, a hidden or reduced Ribbon isn’t an edge case, it’s the normal state of affairs.
This makes Command Search the practical primary interface for a wide range of commands on mobile. The staff filter is a good illustration: the Reference specifically notes that the way to add a Staff Filter on mobile is to “select the desired filter type from the Command Search results.” That’s not a shortcut offered as an alternative — it’s how you do it. Many commands that on desktop you’d reach through a dialog or the full Ribbon are most efficiently accessed on mobile by tapping the search icon or, if you have a keyboard attached, through the comma key.
If you’ve been building the Command Search habit on desktop, that investment pays off immediately when you pick up your phone or tablet. And if you use Sibelius primarily on mobile, Command Search isn’t optional — it’s central. The mobile Redo button that was added to the Keypad in Sibelius 2023.8 is a useful companion to this: once you’ve run a command via Command Search, Redo can repeat it without going back to the search field.
Command Search and Notation Express
Notation Express, the series of Stream Deck profiles available at Notation Central, is built around exactly the same principle David articulated on the podcast: commands exist on a spectrum.
At one end, the things so embedded in your muscle memory that a shortcut is the natural expression of them. At the other, the things you do so rarely that a menu is fine. In the middle — that large zone of frequently-useful-but-not-memorized commands — is where both Notation Express and Command Search earn their place.
The Stream Deck covers the high-frequency end of that middle range: one button press for actions you reach for constantly. Command Search covers the rest, particularly the commands you need a few times per session rather than dozens. They aren’t competing for the same territory.
There’s one behavioral difference from Dorico worth noting for users who work in both programs: pressing J a second time in Dorico pre-populates the Jump Bar with whatever you last ran there, so repeating a command is just J then Return. Command Search works a bit differently — it retains whatever text you typed until you manually clear it, so if you searched for “add” and ran Add Staff Filter, that “add” will still be sitting there next time you invoke it. But it won’t have promoted your most recent result to the top the way Dorico does.
Sibelius addressed the broader need to repeat recent commands in its own way with Enhanced Redo, introduced in Sibelius 2023.8. Here’s how it works: when there’s nothing left to redo via the normal Undo/Redo workflow, triggering Redo (Cmd+Y on Mac, Ctrl+Y on Windows) will now repeat the most recently executed command. It covers paste operations, gallery selections, transpositions, Inspector changes, key and time signature settings, and plug-in runs — essentially anything substantive, with bare selections and mouse drags sensibly excluded. For repetitive work where you need to apply the same command across multiple passages, this is a surprisingly flexible tool, and one that pairs well with Command Search: find a command via the comma key, run it, then use Redo to repeat it as many times as needed.
The state of the search field
Back in 2021, I raised a few wishes about Command Search that still feel relevant. One was a more prominent UI — the search field anchored to the top-right corner of the Ribbon can be a long way from where your eyes are when you’re deep in a large score, and a floating, center-screen popup (in the spirit of Dorico’s Jump Bar or a Spotlight-style overlay) would reduce a lot of eye-darting. Another was the ability to define custom Command Search terms, the way you can already define custom keyboard shortcuts — so that if you’ve never thought of a three-stroke tremolo as “8 tremolos” (Sibelius’s internal name), you could search for it by whatever word actually comes to mind.
That terminology issue came up directly in my NAMM 2026 conversation with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak, where Joe called it “a fair criticism.” Even with Command Search, you still have to know what Sibelius calls a thing, not just what you call it. I made the same observation in the Jump Bar article about Dorico — that typing “measure” into the Jump Bar won’t get you where you want to go — but the vocabulary gap exists in Sibelius too. The difference is that Dorico’s official documentation at least provides synonym aliasing for common terms; Command Search matches on Sibelius’s own terminology and nothing else.
From there I connected the problem to natural language interfaces: the next generation of users will arrive expecting to describe what they want in their own words and have software figure out what they mean.
Joe Plazak pointed to discoverability as a longer-term North Star — “whenever they can’t find something, we need to come up with ways so that the application fits them” — which is an encouraging framing, even if the specific path remains unspecified. How natural language eventually works its way into Command Search (or supersedes it) is an interesting open question; for now, if a search turns up nothing, try Sibelius’s preferred vocabulary rather than your own.
Some of this is the natural friction of a feature that’s evolved from something else rather than been designed from scratch. Command Search’s functionality has grown substantially while its visual presentation has remained close to what it was in Sibelius 7 days. Hopefully further refinements — visual and conceptual — are in the pipeline.
Worth the habit
Despite those open wishes, Command Search as it stands is well worth making a habit. Press comma, type what you’re looking for, and execute — whether that’s an articulation buried in the Keypad, a plug-in you use twice a week but can never find, or a key signature you need right now. The coverage is broad, the feedback is immediate, and once the reflex to reach for that comma key is established, you’ll likely be surprised how much of your day it simplifies.
There’s a small irony in enthusiastically promoting keyboard access in Sibelius, a program that made its early reputation on the ease of clicking and dragging notes with a mouse. Mouse input is intuitive, but it’s slow — and after a while, slow is its own kind of friction. Command Search is one of the cleaner answers Sibelius has found to that problem. Use it.
I entered “Sibelius-land” the same year the ribbon was introduced – but I was today-years-old when I learned that “comma” would bring up the Command Search field. Oh, the things we miss over time… Thanks for this article!
Hi Robert. I’m very glad to hear that you learned something new today. It’s never too late!
Bob Zawalich
I enjoyed this, and found some commands I didn’t know existed, like Move Instruments Up, and Move Instruments Down. So you could, for example use these in the Execute Commands plugin to create a new plugin you could assign a shortcut to, and move staves up and down with the push of a button.
Notation Express can do that too, I bet. Execute Commands has nice lists of the available commands by category, and is another way to see what is out there.