Jump to it: tips for using Dorico’s Jump Bar

If you’ve ever found yourself hunting through Dorico’s menus for something you know exists but can’t quite place, there’s a better way — and it’s as simple as pressing J.

That’s the Jump Bar, and while it isn’t exactly a secret (it’s been in Dorico for several versions now), it doesn’t get talked about as much as it deserves.

On the most recent episode of the Scoring Notes podcast, David MacDonald made an observation that I think frames the Jump Bar’s value perfectly: in any complicated program, there’s a spectrum of commands. At one extreme are the things so embedded in your muscle memory that your fingers find them before your brain has caught up — note input, basic navigation, the shortcuts you’ve used thousands of times. At the other extreme are things you do so rarely that you’ve never bothered learning the shortcut and are perfectly happy hunting through a submenu once or twice a year.

But in between those two poles lies a large middle ground — commands you use often enough to matter, but not often enough to have committed to muscle memory — and that’s precisely where the Jump Bar earns its keep.

What the Jump Bar does

Press J from anywhere in Dorico, and a floating search bar appears in the center of your screen.

From there, you can find and execute virtually any command Dorico knows about, without reaching for a menu or remembering where a feature is buried in the interface. Think of it as Dorico’s own built-in command launcher — in the same spirit as Alfred or Raycast on the Mac, or Spotlight on steroids — except it speaks the language of music notation.

The Jump Bar has two main modes. Commands mode (the default when you press J for the first time in a Dorico session) lets you search for and execute any Dorico command by name. Go To mode lets you navigate directly to a bar number, a page, a rehearsal mark, or a flow. You can switch between them by clicking the labels at the top left of the bar, or with keyboard shortcuts: Alt-C (Windows) or Ctrl-1 (macOS) for Commands mode, and Alt-G (Windows) or Ctrl-2 (macOS) for Go To mode. Both are worth knowing.

Searching for commands

The most immediate use of the Jump Bar is finding commands by name.

Can’t remember where the various Respell options live? Type “respell” and it’s right there. Need to apply note spacing changes? Type “note spacing” and hit Return. Need to filter a particular type of element from your selection? The Jump Bar is faster than any menu dive.

John Barron, Steinberg’s international product specialist, singled out the Jump Bar in our NAMM 2026 conversation as a feature he wishes more users would discover — and he made a practical point that’s easy to miss: you don’t need to assign a keyboard shortcut to every command you might use in a session. If you only need something three or four times in the next hour, lean on the Jump Bar instead. A shortcut you assign on a Tuesday is one you’ll have forgotten by Thursday. The Jump Bar is always there, ready to find it fresh.

Two more features worth knowing. Pressing the Down Arrow key when the Jump Bar is open shows a list of your five most frequently used commands — so the things you reach for most often rise to the top automatically, without any setup.

If you find yourself typing the same long command names repeatedly, you can assign custom aliases to them in Preferences > Key Commands, so that a short abbreviation of your own choosing triggers the full command.

One important caveat that we talked about on the podcast: Dorico searches its own terminology, not yours. Type “measure” into the Jump Bar, and the results will not be what you expect — you’ll see options related to tremolos, not bars. Since Dorico (like Sibelius) uses “bar” rather than “measure,” this is a term that can trip up Finale refugees in particular.

If a search comes up empty, try Dorico’s preferred vocabulary rather than your own — and when even that doesn’t help, the Dorico help documentation does include aliasing for many common synonyms, so searching “measure” there will surface bar-related results. It’s a useful reference to keep in a browser tab.

The broader terminology limitation is something I suspect the software will eventually address as natural language processing works its way more deeply into these tools — John acknowledged as much in that same NAMM conversation, noting that helping users describe what they want in their own words, rather than the program’s vocabulary, is a logical next step for the Jump Bar’s evolution.

Navigating the score

The Go To capability is something I find myself using more than I’d have predicted.

The syntax is simple and worth memorizing: “b” for bar (b32 goes to bar 32), “p” for page (p6 goes to page 6), “r” for rehearsal mark (“rK” goes to rehearsal mark K), and “f” for flow (“f3” goes to Flow 3 — and “fn” and “fp” jump to the next or previous flow, which is handy in multi-movement works).

Switch to Go To mode with Alt-G (Windows) or Ctrl-2 (macOS), type your destination, and press Return. For quickly landing on a specific location in a large score — particularly one where scrolling has become tedious — it’s hard to beat.

The features most people haven’t discovered

Perhaps the most underrated thing about the Jump Bar is that it remembers the last command you ran. Press J again after having searched for something, and that same command will be pre-populated and ready to execute with a single Return.

This turns out to be powerful for any kind of repetitive or assembly-line work. Say you need to filter dynamics in several places across a score — not the whole thing, just a big chunk here and another chunk there. Use the Jump Bar to find Filter Grouped Dynamics the first time, execute it, go to the next section, press J, and it’s already there waiting. What could have required a dedicated keyboard shortcut or three mouse clicks becomes two keystrokes: J, Return. Anyone who does detailed cleanup passes on a score will recognize how valuable this is.

Another underrated feature is the ability to assign an alias to a command in the Jump Bar, so you can use shorter entries for your favorite commands. Immediately after the command, type the equal sign = followed by the characters you want to use as the alias. It’s like having a separate set of shortcuts that apply only within the Jump Bar; a very rough analogue would be the key tips in Sibelius, which only apply once you apply focus to the Ribbon.

For example, to assign the alias rr to the Remove Rests command, enter Remove Rests=rr. Pressing Return will execute the command and assign the alias; Alt/Opt-Return will assign the alias without executing the command. You can manage these in Preferences > Key Commands.

The Jump Bar and Notation Express

If you use our Notation Express Classic or Notation Express XL Stream Deck profiles for Dorico (available at Notation Central), you might notice that we don’t include a dedicated button for the Jump Bar. That’s entirely intentional. The Jump Bar is one of the very few Dorico features where the native keyboard shortcut is so simple (it’s just J, one of the last unclaimed single keys) that adding a Stream Deck button would be redundant.

What I’d encourage, instead, is thinking of the Jump Bar and Notation Express as complementary tools that operate at different tiers of that command spectrum David described.

A good illustration: Notation Express does include buttons for Go to Start, Go to End, Go to Bar, and Go to Page — the navigation tasks you reach for constantly, where a single button press is the fastest possible option.

The Jump Bar’s Go To mode, meanwhile, handles the less frequent cases: jumping to a specific rehearsal mark, landing on a particular flow in a multi-movement work, or navigating somewhere specific in a score you don’t have fully memorized. The Stream Deck covers the common cases; the Jump Bar covers everything else. Together, they make a workflow where almost nothing requires dropping what you’re doing to browse a menu.

One area where this pairing is particularly nice: the Jump Bar can invoke Dorico’s popovers directly. If you can’t remember what key to press to open the time signatures popover, for instance, just type “time” in the Jump Bar and you will see the option to Create Time Signature without knowing the shortcut.

That’s not a trivial example; the shortcut is Shift+M for “meter”, which isn’t obvious to new Dorico users.

Although we have a full slate of time signatures, as well as key signatures on the 32-key Notation Express XL profile, they aren’t on the more compact 15-key Notation Express Classic profile, so if you’re using the smaller profile, this is a perfect illustration of using the Stream Deck and the Jump Bar in tandem.

Over time, you may find that you memorize some of these through repeated use — which is, in a way, how the Jump Bar pays forward on itself.

Coming up: Command Search in Sibelius

If all of this sounds like it might have a counterpart in Sibelius, you’re right: it does. Sibelius has its own equivalent called Command Search, accessible from the top right of the Ribbon by pressing the comma key (because, as we noted on the podcast, nearly every other key was already spoken for). Command Search can launch any Ribbon command, any plug-in — first- or third-party — and has a few distinctive tricks of its own, including the ability to enter key signatures by typing their names directly. We’ll cover it in a follow-up post.

For now, if you’re a Dorico user who hasn’t made the Jump Bar a habit yet, the prescription is simple: spend one week pressing J as your first instinct any time you’d otherwise reach for a menu. I think you’ll find the habit forms faster than you’d expect — and once it does, you’ll start noticing just how much of the middle ground it covers. By any measure, it’s a leap worth taking.