Hi Patrick, I've finally gotten to your last post here with the images in it.

> Goal: showing the faces of the cube in the Red Style

I think I understand now that when you say "showing" you don't mean the action of hiding or showing things like when you click on things to hide them or show them (changing their state I mean), you mean just the status display of the eye?

Then what about with the actions like clicking on items in "Types" - would you want that to also work in a similar restricted way so that once you only had red showing, clicking on Types/Curves would only show red curves only instead of all curves?

I think that would have some major negative consequences, because it would mean for example that you could not do an operation on all curves just by going immediately to "Types", you would have to first go through all styles to turn on all of them first, before the actions in "Types" would impact all objects.

That's potentially a lot of extra steps for some of the most simple actions like "show all curves" which are very easy to do currently.


Also, I think it would be pretty confusing if the status display was a separate thing from the actions. I mean it would not be good to show the eyes in Types by a kind of automatic filtering by styles, but then target different ones when you clicked on them. For predictable and simple operation, it should be the same items targeted whether it is for status display (how the eye is shown) or what is targeted by actions like clicking.

So really the key thing under the system that you are talking about would be to understand the consequences of how the actions would work, not just the status display alone...


I think what would be more feasible would be if you could do some kind of special action that would declare some item or set of items to be working as a "filter", which would then cause the kind of narrowing effect that you are talking about, for both status display and actions. But I don't think it would work to do it totally automatic, you would need to do something special to get a filter, the default is a lot easier to understand when Types / Curves just always means "All curves".

- Michael