[PD] shortcuts for patching

[padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk]

I agree. Now I've used it for a while I'm seeing one or two minor annoyances and things for my wishlist. Groups would be a useful addition to the pd-gui, along with hide/reveal. I realise groups can get complicated to manage, deleting and adding inclusively/exclusively etc.
In the worst case they become a royal PITA. So while I'm thinking about this again here's another way of looking at it..

The issue it addresses is selecting objects in a very cluttered patch.
In theoretical best practice you shouldn't ever end up with such cluttered patches because you would subpatch things in a timely and organised fashion. But in practice I tend to build quite a lot before getting to a position where it's time to reconcile large parts of the patch into subpatches and abstractions. What would help is a far easier and smarter way of creating subpatches, which in a way *are* "groups".

Two things would help with this. Firstly the process of creating a [pd mysubpatch] object, copying and pasting all elements into it while keeping track of all inlets and outlets could be much improved. Selecting a whole bunch of objects and simply clicking a "make subpatch" that found all terminal signal paths at the boundaries and automatically asigned [inlet/inlet~/outlet/outlet~] would be lovely. 

Another would be subpatch "aliases" with a "convert to unique copy" procedure - they would behave like in-file abstractions. 
To be honest I don't entirely get "abstractions". Sure they speed up reuse but they only seem to really help get around the need for tables and delays to be named and the whole rather annoying $0- scoping mess. It's the fact they exist in separate files that makes the headaches. I prefer to use everything in one file to get easier management. In a way abstractions are a danger because changing them can break some other patches. Having anonymous simple delays would go a long way towards simplifying many patches, but that's another topic, however "aliases" would seem to solve a number of issues. They could be combined into the above subpatching procedure. In summary then, what I envisage is as follows:

You select some objects
You click a "subpatch" option
A dialog appears asking for a name (automatically filled with a unique sequential number) The new object is created with automatic inlets/outlets, and why not, wired in-situ in its current place so it can be immediately tested.

You select a subpatch and copy - a dialog asks whether you want 
a unique or aliased copy. An alias is identical to an abstraction with all scoping rules satisfied, but it only exists in the current file, if you edit one instance in the patch all others change too.

that's my loose change on the subject,
cheers,
Andy

>on the vector theme, i think a group function would be
>handy (group several objects then select them with one
>click)
>
>all the best
>
>adam
>
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