Hi ed, thanks for the feedback!

A lot of these things seem to revolve around using special modifier keys to do things - just in general I actually try to avoid a huge overload on so many special modifier keys required to do things. One reason is that I tried to make MoI be able to work without actually needing to touch the keyboard at all, but there is also another reason which is that a huge array of different modifier keys tends to be difficult for people to learn, and all that functionality tends to stay hidden from a lot of people.

That tends to be a problem when a function would be hidden for say 99.99% of users - that tends to make me sit back and wait until maybe some more accessible and discoverable design might be achieved.


> 4. split/select_view/reset single shortcut: Just a whim. Can it be possible to
> have a shortcut that when you hold a key it splits the view, and when you
> release, it stops in the view you have the mouse over and if you just press
> the shortcut it resets the view.

Right now there's no way to overload a single shortcut key with different actions for "hold" versus "tap" which I guess would be required for this one.

The problem with setting up something like that would be how to manage it and how to set up a clear UI for controlling it. More UI is a problem because having a lot of additional UI to control things that are only very rarely tends to clog things up and just makes the overall UI more complex and harder to manage for the areas that would actually be more widely used.

It's a goal for MoI to have a streamlined UI and to be easy to use, and so having features that would require a massively elaborate control panel to set up and manage are really at odds with that core goal of MoI to have simplicity and ease of use...

- Michael

I know, some of those features will be hidden but for example, one of my favorite things of MoI works that way, holding ctrl while using a tool like rotate makes a copy instead of just rotating the object. Another one is copying a point of a curve will make a copy of that curve with that point modified. Those are hidden features that I use a lot and if I discovered them I think more people did it.

This aren't in the "hidden" or "modifier-key-needed" group:

Selections at the browser
Make objects work like styles
Cycling shortcuts

For the hold and tap shortcut I was just wondering, nothing important.

Hi ed,

> Those are hidden features that I use a lot and if I discovered them I think more people did it.

Yeah but those are some good examples of when it can help things to be more discoverable if there is some consistency with the shortcut key being used for the same kind of thing in multiple different areas, like in the one you're describing there it's all on a common theme of making a copy by using Ctrl.

The ones that you were talking about previously for clines I don't think would fit into that kind of category, they'd be pretty unique just to clines.

Also I think it's possible to just set up a regular shortcut key to get those particular actions triggered, if you set up the following on regular shortcut keys:

script: /* Reposition a just drawn cline */ moi.drawingAids.constructionLineReposition();

script: /* Reorient a just drawn cline */ moi.drawingAids.constructionLineReorient();


So if you want to avoid going to that cline menu and instead use a keystroke, that's possible to set up now without needing to dedicate a special hard coded modifier key for that...



> For the hold and tap shortcut I was just wondering, nothing important.

I'm not sure if I've ever really seen that kind of dual hold/tap type thing as a regular shortcut key mechanism with any other software. The complication with it being unfamiliar is that it would probably be pretty difficult to make a good setup mechanism for it that did not also complicate making just regular more familiar type shortcut keys. I do want to overhaul the shortcut key editor but the main reason for that is to make the setup for it easier than it currently is, something like press the key that you want to assign the shortcut to rather than typing in the label of it as currently done.


> Selections at the browser
> Make objects work like styles
> Cycling shortcuts

Did you want me to comment on every single one of these? Some things I think we've already discussed before, like the downside of the auto generating object names being that it would clog up the names list instead of letting you put just the important objects on there, and that trying to make it an option would probably require modifications in every single command which probably makes it a kind of wide impact type of thing.


re: browser selection - I'm probably going to try to make a menu pop out when you click on the name which has some various actions on it, that's why the selection action was moved to the dot to free up room for that. Also with adding in the selection dot indicator feature it also made sense to use it also for the toggle action as well so that it behaved in the same way as clicking on the eye icon for toggling visibility.

cycling shortcuts / shortcut key sequences is something that I would like to add in the future, it's a bit tricky to implement though because it probably involves some kind of pause mechanism since it can't execute the shortcut on the first keystroke if that keystroke is also part of a sequence. Then in addition to the implementation it will have some setup and management UI stuff as well.

It's not unusual for the UI for managing and controlling these kinds of things to be one of the biggest barriers to me sticking them into MoI - one of the main ways that I keep the UI for MoI under control and not get all bloated up is to be very conservative about slapping in new features that require significant new UI. If a lot of UI is involved it usually puts things quite a ways on the back burner where I'd like them to sit and stew for a while before jumping into them.

Modifier keys are kind of similar in a certain sense - it's usually hard to take such features away after they've been introduced and I hate to have the situation where there is finally some significant idea that really needs to use modifier keys (like maybe say some kind of special history editing mechanism), but it can't be done easily anymore because all the modifier keys are already taken up doing other things. That's why if it is possible to do it with a regular shortcut key it's not likely to get a dedicated hard coded modifier key for it...

- Michael

Ok, thanks for your answers.