Hi Andy, so the main problem with it working the way that you describe (the object section having some kind of separate and higher weight to its visibility functions than the other sections) is that it leads to things like this:

You receive a file from someone that has created a named object and hidden it using that "special" section of the scene browser. However you have no idea about this and you just want to show everything in the model, so maybe you go to the "Styles" section of the scene browser and turn on all styles, or maybe you just use the Edit > Hide command to show all objects. But unknown to you, you didn't actually show all objects because of the "extra-special" weight on the one particular hide method that someone else happened to use previously.

So that's one reason why I have tried to avoid that kind of multiple layered hiding modes, it can easily lead to confusion. It's easy for the same kind of confusion to happen when you open older files you created yourself, not even just when receiving files from other people.

By not having any kind of special weight to one particular kind of hide, that allows for all hiding and showing methods to be treated equally and behave in a consistent and predictable manner.

That doesn't just apply to the scene browser sections (like Objects, Types, and Style categories), but also to the separate "Hide" command that's on the Edit menu that lets you hide or isolate the current selection or show all objects. Because these all work in a consistent way when you go to do an action that is supposed to show all objects, you can know that it really is going to show all objects and not possibly miss some.

Also for the problem that you describe about using the Types section, if I am following you correctly all you need to do is click on the same spot a second time and you will get what you want.

Here are the steps -

You started with some objects hidden and now you want to go to the "Edges" entry under the Types section to hide all edges that are currently being shown.

When you do a first click on the eye icon, it does show all the edges since the default action for a mixed state (some things hidden, some things shown) is to show.

But then a second click in the same spot will hide all those edges that were just shown - the end result after that second click is that your object that was originally hidden is now hidden and all the other edges that you wanted to hide are also hidden. So isn't that the state that you wanted to get things in? It's just a second click away in the same spot...

Also another thing which you may want to set in moi.ini is a flag under the [Scene Browser] settings:
[Scene Browser]
SelectSkipHiddenObjectsDefault=n


If you set that to be SelectSkipHiddenObjectsDefault=y then when you click on the text part of the scene browser item to select objects, it will only select the currently visible objects and not just everything that goes with that slot. This is normally available by doing shift+click on the text part, but if you change that setting it will be available just by a plain click.

So once that is set up you could do something like select all visible edges by a click on the text label part of the Edges entry in the Scene Browser types section and then hide them with Edit > Hide.

- Michael