[L2Ork-dev] Snapping to grid

Jonathan Wilkes jon.w.wilkes at gmail.com
Sun Feb 28 21:34:03 EST 2021


On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 2:10 PM Gilberto Agostinho
<gilbertohasnofb at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I think what I merged into the main repo is this:

* if in snap-to-grid mode, you get the grid background. If it's too
distracting, let me know what opacity to set it to.
* if not in snap-to-grid mode, there's a little lock graphic that
shows up in the top-right-hand corner of the patch. Much less
distracting IMO, but a good visual indicator for new users.

>
> 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?

Yes, there is a set of technical challenges that called for that
change. I think there's a way to keep the old behavior, but it would
require a lot of workarounds in the cost and this was easier.

-Jonathan

>
> Many thanks!
> Gilberto
>
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