[L2Ork-dev] Snapping to grid

[Gilberto Agostinho]

Hi everyone,

I just would like to make some comments about the new snapping grid 
feature. I know this topic has been discussed before, such as in the 
thread 'Purr Data straight patch chords option and disabling grid 
background', but I thought that replying to an older thread would not be 
the best way to talk about this (apologies if I should have done just that).

I do like the new snapping feature very much, it is such a nice addition 
to Purr-Data! But similarly to the OP of the previously mentioned 
thread, I also dislike having the grid in the background as I find it 
quite distracting. I would much prefer it to be white all the time, even 
with the snapping option turned on. In my opinion, even if the grid 
would be completely hidden, the option of snapping objects would still 
be useful as a way of quantising their possible positions, leading to 
neater patches when compared to disabling the snapping feature, but at 
the same time without the overly distracting grid in the background.

 From what I understood from that thread, one of the reasons for not 
adding an option to completely hide the grid is to allow users to 
differentiate between edit and run modes. But in Pd Vanilla (and I 
believe also in previous versions of Purr Data) this difference was 
handled mostly using different mouse cursors for each mode, which seemed 
to work fine for their users: the cursor was a hand in edit mode and an 
arrow in run mode (I think vanilla also adds a [edit] tag to the window 
title, though this seems hardly useful). The cursor change between modes 
is still present in Purr-Data 2.15.2, so people used to Pd vanilla or to 
the old way of showing different modes would still be able to clearly 
differentiate between them (though I think that leaving the grid on by 
default is good thing for new users). In this case, perhaps it could be 
worth considering to add an option for users to set the opacity of the 
grid; some might want it very light, others such as myself might want it 
gone altogether, while others might still like the default opacity.

In terms of my workflow, I tend to leave my patches almost constantly in 
edit mode and I hold Alt to momentarily change the mode and click on 
buttons/messages, and releasing it to go back to editing my patch. I 
think most people doing live-coding will also work in a similar fashion. 
As a short comment, this shortcut also seems to have been altered at 
some point, so now it is Alt (and not Ctrl) that momentarily activates 
run mode in Purr-Data, although Ctrl is still used in Pd vanilla. A bit 
confusingly, Ctrl-e (and not Alt-e) is used to toggle between modes. Was 
there some incompatibility with the older Ctrl shortcut that led to this 
change?

Many thanks!
Gilberto