[PD] intelligent patching

Roman Haefeli reduzent at gmail.com
Thu Jun 7 13:14:39 CEST 2018


Hi IOhannes

I think those additions are immensely useful. Thanks a lot for porting
them and thanks to Jonathan and Ivica for implementing them (I hope I
thanked all persons involved, and would like to include those that I
didn't know about).


On Wed, 2018-06-06 at 15:37 +0200, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
> new connection features:
> 
> - select any two objects, and press <Ctrl>+<k> (or <Cmd>+<k> if you
> insist), to connect them (trivially, so just the first iolet)

Cool.  A shortcut is often quicker than finding the right spot with the
mouse.


> - to connect a (signal) outlet to multiple arbitrary inlets, you can
> now
> press <Shift> while hovering the yet-unconnected cord over an inlet

> - to add more connections between two already connected object,
> select
> the connection and pressl <Ctrl>+<d> to extend the connections to the
> right ("duplicate")


> - to fully connect two objects, *select* both objects before
> connecting
> them.

Also very nice. Though it's odd that you can employ a shortcut when
creating a single connection, but you need to manually make the
connection when the end result should be many connections. Can shortcut
and multiple connections be combined somehow? 

> - to connect multiple objects to a single inlet, select all the
> source
> objects (but not the sink object) before connecting them.

Hm... now this makes my above point mute, since obviously for <ctrl>-k
to work you need to select both ends. But I like how you can do
different things with different kinds of selections. So maybe combining
  multi-connect with shortcut is not such good idea after all. 

>   - (the other way round works as well, but will give you fan-
> outs!!!)
> - to connect multiple objects to a multi-inlet object, select all the
> source objects *and* the sink object before connecting the leftmost
> source to the leftmost inlet.
> - to connect a multi-outlet object to multiple objects, select all
> the
> source object *and* all the sink objects before connecting the
> leftmost
> outlet to the leftmost sink.

I noticed that <ctrl>-z only removes the manually created link when
creating many links simultaneously. Definitely not a serious issue, but
still deserves to be mentioned.

I truly hope this makes it into Pd. My local Pd will have it built-in
as long as it doesn't break. This improves my patching  work-flow
dramatically while having (almost) no side effect (the one I can think
of is spending a shortcut, which is certainly well spent).  

This feature request is only loosely related: Call me an OCD patient,
but I spend quite some time on getting all the patch chords straight.
This would be so much easier if objects would snap into an invisible
grid of 10x10 pixels. When not creating GUIs, there is no point in
placing objects at pixel-exact positions. Ideally, snap-to-grid could
be turned on and off by shortcut or menu. 


Roman



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