Make comparing notes easier

[unlessgames]

Ran into this while testing the vars stuff and using trigger in the callback.

Currently it is a bit hard to figure out what trigger.notes[1].key actually is. The docs say it is

key : string | number
Note key & octave string (or MIDI note number as setter)

But there is no way to know from Renoise what it actually is (unless you start from the terminal and use print), is it a number, is it a string, is it "C" or "C4" or "c4" and so on.

The failsafe solution is to do

context.trigger.notes[1].key == note("c4").notes[1].key

Which is kinda unintuitive and boilerplate-y, so maybe it would be useful to have something to make identifying and matching note tables easier. For example the eq operator could work with NoteTables so you could say

context.trigger == note("c4")

Or an is function that would take anything that can be converted into a NoteTable and compare itself to it

context.trigger:is("c4")

Maybe something to be able to just match the key while ignoring the volume and other properties?

context.trigger:has_key("c4")

This could even be smarter like has_key("c") could return true for C on any octave.

[emuell]

There also is note_number: note_number(context.trigger.notes[1].key) == note_number("c4") which allows normalizing the note key before comparing.

A metatable __eq impl surely would be useful in other cases too. Same for the other related user data like chord and scale for consistency.

Not sure about the has_key. It`s very specific, but in this case indeed would be the most elegant way to deal with the trigger note.