Set wire color

Nu Audio Science · 8 May 2005

I was thinking this this afternoon actually, I have one of those huge great windows in the livin room and i was on a laptop, The sun was coming through the window and do you think i could see them yello wires could i f**k.

Good call Seconded

infuzion · 9 May 2005

Or atleast a way you can hover over a module, & all their connected wires become obviously thicker. Or maybe you can add colored bands at both ends of the same wire (like audio & networking pros do for their wires)

Tom7777 · 9 May 2005

No they would need to be a solid color really. Its the best way to catagorize things and know exactly what they are and doing. I don't know if you are doing the type of things i am with SM but i have been getting very confused becuase i dont know whats what basically when there hundreds of the same color wire all connecting close together.

Nu Audio Science · 9 May 2005

Matbe a right click brings up a list of connections so you could reorder or disconnect as needed ?

Tom7777 · 10 May 2005

Yeah it would be right click, the menu you get when you right click a wire has much less options than if you right click a module so i think that it would work really well as a right click option 🙂

malc · 26 May 2005

Tom, I'd forgotton about this I have to admit. Only your post on another thread reminded me.

So the problem is that when you have many links it's difficult to know what goes where? Can you post a picture of a situation like this?

stefan · 26 May 2005

For me, most of the time it's due to laziness. Take this for example:

If I just used stereo connectors (a bus with left + right in it) I'd basicly halve the number of connections. I'll get to it some time I guess 🙂

malc · 26 May 2005

Thanks Stefan. So I can see that in this situation, if you wanted to check at a glance that the links all go to the right places it's very difficult indeed. What if you held down a key and all the links changed to show each one with a different colour? This would save you having to assign colours and it woudl only occur when you needed to see the wood from the trees.

Are there any other issues I'm missing?

stefan · 26 May 2005

malc wrote: Thanks Stefan. So I can see that in this situation, if you wanted to check at a glance that the links all go to the right places it's very difficult indeed. What if you held down a key and all the links changed to show each one with a different colour? This would save you having to assign colours and it woudl only occur when you needed to see the wood from the trees.

Are there any other issues I'm missing?

Not really, and for me, it's still a non-issue since I could heavily reduce the number of links instead of having like... lots and lots of colors on the screen 🙂 But apart from that, your suggestion is swell!

skOre · 26 May 2005

I have no problem with lots of same colored links. Still, it could look extra nice if you apply a nice coloring scheme 😉

bManic · 29 May 2005

malc wrote: Thanks Stefan. So I can see that in this situation, if you wanted to check at a glance that the links all go to the right places it's very difficult indeed. What if you held down a key and all the links changed to show each one with a different colour? This would save you having to assign colours and it woudl only occur when you needed to see the wood from the trees.

Are there any other issues I'm missing?

Changing every line to a different colour would just make it much more messy. IMHO let the user change colours of wires. This would be great from an educational point and for future tutorials ".. now, take a look at that bright red wire, going from the filter to the waveshaper.."

Also, maybe make a modifier key or an user option in preference that changes the colour of the wire that the mouse is currently hovering over, user settable colour of course. This way by hovering over a wire in a total mess you could always see where it goes. The wire could also get a few pixels thicker than all the rest to further improve the visual cue.

Cheers! bManic

Tom7777 · 29 May 2005

Well malc my schematics just look like stefancrs but maybe a few more wires and its basically just when im using the bus, selector and multiplexer modules also. I have thought of another way you could make it a bit simpler for these modules, if you have a key held down and put it over a certain selector input that has a connection then it will say the number of that input. This would make making complex selector events slightly easier maybe.

Changing every line to a different colour would just make it much more messy. IMHO let the user change colours of wires. This would be great from an educational point and for future tutorials ".. now, take a look at that bright red wire, going from the filter to the waveshaper.."

Well thats what i mean by my first post basically, not connectors outputs or inputs colors just the single wires color. It would be a bit like something that Frontpage (Web App) uses for color choice and you would have Automatic which would be the default color, standard colors which would be a basic set - red, blue, green and yellow ect and then you would have custom colors where you could set any rgb color, maybe also have a currently used tab also so any already selected colors would be simple to use again and again. The right click menu could use dropdown tabs so its just a Title with a downwards arrow next to it until its clicked on so this way it will be simple looking until expanded.

Also, maybe make a modifier key or an user option in preference that changes the colour of the wire that the mouse is currently hovering over, user settable colour of course. This way by hovering over a wire in a total mess you could always see where it goes. The wire could also get a few pixels thicker than all the rest to further improve the visual cue.

Nice idea, sometimes if the wires which are slightly transparent and are all over the place a slight increase to the visibility can sometimes still make things hard to notice. Being able to set the hover color to a bright red would make things a lot simpler IMO.

malc · 29 May 2005

Thanks for your suggestions folks. The links already change slightly when you hover over them so that you know which link you are over. I deliberately made this very subtle as it can be very distracting if you get loads of flashes of colour as you move your mouse over a schematic with many links. So I think there would have to be a modifier key involved as bManic suggested so the subtlety is lessened only when you're in highlight mode.

The problem with allowing you to set your own colours for links on a permanent basis is that colour is currently used to indicate data type. I think it could easily confuse things if you had a red link in a GUI section. But I can see that the ability to highlight a link either on mouse over or permanently could be very useful. I have some ideas so I'll post some pics to illustrate them when I get a chance.

Thanks again.

Tom7777 · 29 May 2005

For what i said before the alpha levels for the colors would not be editable so the highlight would be exactly the same as it is already, why not make it so that theres the option to reset all the set wire colors via the SM options or something.

The problem with allowing you to set your own colours for links on a permanent basis is that colour is currently used to indicate data type. I think it could easily confuse things if you had a red link in a GUI section.

Maybe, i usually leave notes for myself via strings in any of my non finished projects so i would say Red = Item1 ect in those and i would know exactly what was what if i had left a project for a while or something, This idea was more of a dev type option for people who are doing more complex things with SM, You could always have a Basic Mode and a Dev Mode in the options and if a newbie has Basic mode set then they loaded a schematic which a dev had been using that the wires had been set in then the newbie would just see normal colors, i don't know if thats a good idea, what does everyone think?