Hi Kurt, yeah I struggled quite a bit trying to figure out what to do with hide.

Just like you mentioned, the need to keep things uncluttered is a high priority, that's why I hesitate to add a bunch more buttons in right now.

In the future I would eventually like to make it possible to more easily edit the UI to your own preferences, but it will be quite a while before I'll be able to make that happen. In the meantime it is actually possible to edit the UI by editing the .htm files that define the UI in a text editor like notepad. If you'd like I can tell you how to do that in some detail so that you can move buttons around where you like right now. But it's kind of inconvenient because you'll have to repeat the process with each new release.


> I find myself selecting items, then desiring to hide everything else to work on it. So it's
> select, invert selection, back to the edit tab, then hide.

I think that your best bet for speeding this up would be to make a keyboard shortcut that would basically be a macro that did all of these steps for you with just one key press.

Petr actually showed the script macro for this above in this thread, it's this:

script:moi.geometryDatabase.invertSelection();moi.geometryDatabase.hide();

If you go to Options / Shortcut keys, you can push the "Add" button there which will insert a new blank shortcut key. Click in the "Key" column and add the key you want to use to activate it, like "H" for example. Then click in the "Command" column and paste in the script line above.

Now when you want to hide everything else except for the current selection, just push "H" and it will be all done for you, no need to switch between tabs.


> How about a Show All button.

This is actually built into the regular Hide button already - just push it twice and that will do a "Show All".

On the first click, if nothing is selected then it will temporarily display all the hidden items so you can show just a subset of them. But if you click on the button a second time (or also hit "done" without selecting anything), then everything will be shown.


I know this system makes hide/show somewhat more complex, but it puts a lot of functionality inside of just one button, these are the kind of compromises that I have to make to keep the UI clean and streamlined overall.

- Michael