Channel-specific Order List?

[Jax]

Hello,

I have a really dumb question here: Is it possible to have a per-channel Order List? For instance, say I want a new frame in the list where I repeat the pattern of channel two but play a new pattern on channel one, would that be possible? It's a really trivial feature that essentially all trackers have, so I assume OpenMPT features that in a way or another, but Google won't answer me. Then again, maybe I'm just bad at researching...

(Copy-pasting would not work. If I made changes to the pattern, they should appear everywhere that the pattern appears).

[Saga Musix]

I'm not sure where you got the impression from that "essentially all trackers" have this feature - there was a handful of them in the 90s and nobody ended up using them. Off the top of my head, I cannot even remember a single format among the 30+ that OpenMPT supports which has this feature. Maybe one or two of them do, at most. Maybe it's more common in chip trackers but not for ergonomic reasons, but rather to save memory.
So no, OpenMPT doesn't support this feature and it's unlikely it will do so anytime soon. In the end, I personally think this kind of order list editing discourages the user to do little variations because they always first have to check if the channel hasn't been used in another pattern before changing it. For the same reason I always duplicate patterns when working on a track rather than just inserting the same pattern again into the order list, because I know that most of the time I will want to edit a little detail in one copy of the pattern, and I will totally forget that I have used that pattern in another place and then I accidentally have modified that other copy of the pattern as well. Duplicating a change is always easy - undoing an accidental change long after the fact is hard.

[Jax]

This is a real surprise for me... FastTracker II has this, and it's one of the main supported formats. Having this feature can only be a plus, not a handicap - if I want a separate copy of a pattern, I could just duplicate it. This feature is especially useful for percussions and such... I can't really see why this would not be included; it seems more of a burden than anything else, and a frustrating one since OpenMPT is probably the best free tracker around.

It is my opinion that, for the sake of pure convenience, this should most definitely be supported in OpenMPT.

[Saga Musix]

No, FT2 does't have a per-channel order list. OpenMPT supports pretty much every feature of all of its editable formats (i.e. MOD, XM, S3M, IT and MPTM). In each of those formats, the order list is on the pattern level, not the channel level. Maybe you are confusing this with the channel clipboard in FT2, which copies a whole channel of the current pattern into its own clipboard (independent from block selections), which you can then paste into another pattern? OpenMPT has that too.

Just for the reference, the thing in the upper-left corner is FT2's order list, and it is just a single item per entry - a pattern, no channels: