đŸ–„ Keeping compositions visually neat?

Discussions
1

Hello!

First, a quick story.
When I was a kid, I programmed on my dad’s computer using GW-BASIC. BASIC, if you’ve never used it, is a simple(duh!) programming language. This version had line numbers, typical of BASIC, which went 10, 20, 30, 40


The reason for this was, very often you realised you needed to insert extra line of code between your existing ones. So then you would type 31, 32, 33. And then RENUM to have the computer automatically re-space your lines out to lovely clean 10, 20, 30
 etc.

Well, I find myself hitting the same issue in Vuo. I would often like to ‘space out’ the existing nodes. I might even make some app (with vuo :slightly_smiling_face: ) to respect the values in a .vuo file. A better way would be some smart spacing UI. But I don’t feel like trying to spec/design that right now.

Anyone have thoughts/ tricks?

1 Like
2

No tricks, sorry, but I looked at auto-spacing the expansion of group sub-compositions in the video on this thread comment (like near a decade ago or something!):

https://community.vuo.org/t/-/5751/3

p.s. I started with Basic too, reading the printouts of the source code for Adventure game and Start-trek running on mainframes got me into fortran and pascal soon followed (real functions and line numbers became optional, Yay!!).  

3

Thanks! Nice mocks. Since the Vuo team sounds busy with Metal and other low-level stuff, nows probably a good time for a user-made cheap and chirpy hack. I’ll have a play and share anything that proves useful.

4

? Mmm ? I don’t understand, you’re speaking about Vuo nodes on the Vuo Editor canvas ? But then I don’t understand the part about creating an app.

If canvas, maybe it could be merged with Auto Clean up Composition Nodes (all and/or selection) again like :alien: Space-out nodes ? Or write a note there ?  

5

Thanks! Since a .vuo file is a text file, I was thinking of doing a basic, almost text replacement. My thinking (which I may try) is to just basically search and replace the existing ‘pos=’ text fragments, scale outwards, and quantise to some grid.

I now voted on that other feature request, thanks for the heads up. Figure the Vuo peeps will get there, in due time. In the mean time, this shall be my hack :slightly_smiling_face:

Screen Shot 2020-09-21 at 2.47.25 pm.png
Screen Shot 2020-09-21 at 2.47.25 pm.png1050×673 170 KB

6

Aaaah ok now I get it ;) thanks

7

yeah some of us used to hack QC text files with “find and replace all” to make global changes to compositions back in the day!