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JackDunaway

Allow Tunnels to Resize Structure Boundaries

Status: New

Currently, if you select a tunnel, you can only move it along the border of the structure - attempting to move the tunnel perpendicular to the structure border is just a no-op. Instead, I'd like to see this action resize the structure!

 

The first video demonstrates current behavior, how tunnels cannot affect structure boundary sizing. The second video shows a selected tunnel resizing the structure boundary as it is repositioned.

 

 

  1. These demonstrations reposition the selection using the Keyboard, but the same principle could apply repositioning a selection with the Mouse.
  2. A side perq of this feature is that structures are resizable with fine, granular control using the Keyboard!
9 Comments
dthor
Active Participant

Very nice! I assume the structure would still follow auto-grow rules? If enabled, you wouldn't be able to cover up any code, and when you reached the smallest limit for the structure, the terminals (alone) would start to move towards the structure.

JackDunaway
Trusted Enthusiast

@dthor wrote:

I assume the structure would still follow auto-grow rules?


That's a good assumption; I agree with this. You'll notice in the second video above that the structure briefly overlaps the Close Ref prim -- this is purely an artifact of the "hacky" scripting for the demo (another "bug" in the demo is that the selection ant trail disappears as I'm using the keyboard. The actual feature would keep the ant trail while moving, just like in the first video)

Intaris
Proven Zealot

This would solve another pet peeve of mine - Trying to resize a structure where a tunnel and the resize Horizontal selector are overlapping.....

 

Kudos.

dthor
Active Participant

@JackDunaway wrote:

You'll notice in the second video above that the structure briefly overlaps the Close Ref prim


That's the very reason why I mentioned it. I'm not sure if I'd have thought about it otherwise... Looks like your bug ended up being helpful! Smiley Very Happy

X.
Trusted Enthusiast
Trusted Enthusiast

I guess another alternative would be to grab the right edge of the structure and expand it to the right: if you could have a keyboard modifier telling the structure to push everything in its way to the right, you would obtain a similar result. Of course, you would want to be able to grow the sructure in 1-pixel increment if that is really something you care about. But that doesn't seem to be necessary for the inteded goal.

SteenSchmidt
Trusted Enthusiast

I really hate auto grow, so I have no comment on how this idea should interact with auto growing structures 😉

 

Anyways, kudos from me for this idea, at least simply because it can sometimes be hard to grab the structure resize handle due to overlapping tunnels (as has been noted). One could hold down CTRL to fix the structure border position if you want up/down movement of the tunnel only (like when moving other objects in the BD).

 

Regards,

Steen

 

PS. Could we please disallow tunneling through the top/bottom structure edges while we're (hopefully) about to modify tunneling? Sorry, totally out of context plug...

CLA, CTA, CLED & LabVIEW Champion
dthor
Active Participant

@ SteenSchmidt:

I only hate auto-grow when it actually grows the structure Smiley Very Happy   I absolutely love it when it prevents me from shrinking the structure over existing code. Perhaps that should be another idea...

vt92
Active Participant

I think this idea makes a lot of sense. 

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BVSmith
Member

I see no videos here 🙂

Seriously, my Firefox only sees two empty white boxes.

Brian Smith
Advanced Light Source
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory