ARGH!!! Keep accidently changing scale! Curse you CTRL!!!
argel1200
Traveler
I keep accidentally adjusting the scale when I undo placing a symbol and when free rotating. Is there a way to change the key used for these (preferably to two different keys)???
Answers
No, that's unfortunately not possible.
You can actually change the undo key, since that is a menu option, and configured through the menu files, although I guess that would be weird.
For free rotate, I advice always being careful about pressing the shift key first, and letting go of it last
I used to do that in the first few months. You get used to it in the end - a bit like touch-typing without even needing to think of what letters you are actually hitting.
Yeah, I'm getting better at it, but dang, it can be really frustrating!! Feels like a design flaw that should have been fixed a decade ago. Makes me want to get a hex editor and find where in the binary the keys are hardcoded.
Edit: Another solution would be a way to lock the scale. A toggle for that would be great! Wonder if a plugin could do that.
Well, I didn't realise you could hide the cursor prompt for ages, so I was forever squashing my trees to death by accidentally placing mountains on top of them.
The control mechanism for lots of commands looks like an unfortunate exposure of some internal implementation details. A little GUI panel that shows the currently-available modifiers would be very nice to have, but I expect that such a thing would require reworking literally dozens of commands and that sort of thing is a great way to catch all sorts of nasty bugs.
Are you just thinking out loud there, Joe, or is this something that might happen one day?
I'm just thinking out loud. Whether it might happen is something else entirely. The existing code base has things nicely isolated and allowing that sort of interaction starts tying system elements together in ways never originally envisioned.
With access to the code base, how hard would it be to change CTRL for scaling to something else? ALT comes to mind, unless that would interfere with menus (personally, I'd take that sacrifice) . Limiting it to Right CTRL could be an option too. I'd even take swapping CTRL and SHIFT (that is, default to free rotation and use CTRL for 15 deg)? There's already that "Enable left-button pre-selection" option so there's precedent for some advanced options for behavior tweaking.
I'm sure that PF will add it to the list of things that would be nice, but you have to remember there is a huge great long list of things that are necessary to get done with first, before the things that are nice are tackled ;)
Making a change in one place is easy, but it invalidates all of the manuals and training materials. Making such a change configurable is much more complex to implement and more difficult to support because (based on my experiences elsewhere) users tend to accidentally get the system into a state where the tutorial doesn't match the observed behaviors. I doubt that the modifier keys on the various commands will get changed any time soon, sorry.
There are a number of places in the software where the behavior can be switched to one of a number of modes (as you pointed out, selection options are one example). However, those modes add a huge amount of complexity to the software and it turns out that they have some corner cases that lead to unexpected behavior.
@jslayton wrote:
Making a change in one place is easy, but it invalidates all of the manuals and training materials.
Not to mention the workflow of all the existing users who've learned to use it.
@argel1200 wrote:
ALT comes to mind, unless that would interfere with menus (personally, I'd take that sacrifice)
Unfortunately, it is the other way around. I don't think there is a way to stop the menus from interfering in a single command, and the alt key causes the menu to grab focus once you let go, not something that you would want in the middle of a command (bloody annoying basically)
What about adding a command to set it so that only advanced users could use it?
@Monsen - good point there on the existing user workflows, Remy. I for one would be pretty distressed if PF start messing around with things I've learned and which I use by instinct these days - and I've only been around for the last 4 years. Goodness knows what people who've been doing it this way for the last 20 years would think.
The counterpoint to that is competition is picking up. Arguably they're goign to have to break existing workflows to keep the product competitive at some point. That or increase the amount of quality content being released. Making it easier to bring new artwork in should be a focus for upcoming updates. I'd also like to see a way to have symbol catlogs auto-generated based on directory structure (including a way to create button groupings).
Edit: we need to clone Sue so we can get monthly updates!! ;)