A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Sat, 29 Jan 2022 19:28:46 GMT

rvirmoors — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 19:28:46 GMT

Get it here: https://github.com/RVirmoors/maxhotkey-pd

I'm mainly focused on the basic mechanic (probably 90% of my patching) of pressing N to make an object, having it stick to the canvas and hide the cursor while you type in the name, and then pressing Return to apply it.

I assume most people here are already used to the existing Pd workflow, but for people like me who are attempting for the millionth time to come over from Max, this might come in handy.

Another great thing to have would be autocomplete. I tried it with completion-plugin, and with a small adjustment they seem to play well together. The next step would be to have autocompletion trigger automatically in a Max-like way... I hope I can find time to look into that.

I also just tested the plugin with Seb's pdnext, and it seems to work just fine, yay!

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Sat, 29 Jan 2022 21:13:00 GMT

60hz — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 21:13:00 GMT

Great.
I love the CMD + click to switch from edit/run mode and Alt for help.
I have to desactivate all other key shortcuts with pd-next to be able to type on boxes with:

  set keybindings \
         ""

But I guess I have a completion-plugin or other plugin conflict

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Sat, 29 Jan 2022 22:39:43 GMT

rvirmoors — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 22:39:43 GMT

yeah with completion-plugin i submitted an issue and hopefully that will get fixed. Did you try the fix I linked to above?

add
pdtk_text_editing_old $mytoplevel $tag $editing
at the end of the pdtk_text_editing proc in completion-plugin.tcl (line 691)

i haven't tried other plugins but yeah, those might raise other conflicts... I'm very new at Tcl so my code is pretty hacky; any suggestions for improvement are welcome

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Thu, 03 Feb 2022 11:49:13 GMT

oid — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 11:49:13 GMT

@rvirmoors In the if statement for the return key if you replace;
menu_send %W deselectall; with;
::pd_bindings::canvas_cycle %W 1 %K %A 0 %k; ::pd_bindings::canvas_cycle %W -1 %K %A 1 %k;
This will keep the object selected when you hit return so the autopatching will still work, next object placed will automatically have its left inlet connected to that objects left outlet. Saves a fair amount of patching time. Escape can be used to apply the object without keeping it selected for those time you want the old behavior. A bit hacky and there may be a better way to do this.

Also for the other single key objects if you put two spaces after the object name instead of one this will place the cursor where you want it so no need to press space every object you want to give an argument. I just give all objects a double space as a rule, pd will just delete them for you if you do not enter an argument. The number keys are the exception, each number key just calls itself, so 1 {1 } \ and so on, these get a single space, this means you can just type 1-2-3-enter and you have a floatbox preset to 123 nice and easy.

32 edits later, I think I caught all the typos.

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Fri, 04 Feb 2022 16:17:24 GMT

rvirmoors — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 16:17:24 GMT

@oid awesome, thanks!

i'm not a big fan (yet?) of autopatching... I'd prefer new objects to appear right under my cursor when pressing N, instead of under what's currently selected. But I can see why people like and use this feature, and keeping a new object selected is Max-like, so I included your suggestion.

(maybe a nice compromise would be for the new object to be connected to the selected one, just spawned at the mouse position? I'm not sure this can be done using just tcl...)

i also added the extra space to the object names. I'd thought of this too, not sure why i hadn't put it in.

the number keys idea is neat but i'm not convinced it needs to be included as default... Which just led me to create a maxhotkey.cfg file where you can easily override the defaults.

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:46:14 GMT

oid — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:46:14 GMT

@rvirmoors Should be possible to have the objects show up under the cursor and have autopatching from tcl. The simple brute force method is to just use tcl to move the object with either the mouse or the logic for the arrowkey movement. Mouse is iffy, not sure if we can warp the curson position with tcl, but I suspect we can, so save current cursor position, warp cursor to previous saved position plus an offset for the default autoplaced object (or just find where the xy is stored for the current selection in the tcl), send mouse button-1 down, warp to saved position, send mouse button up. This has the issue that the exact offset needed is somewhat dependent on font size, assuming the coordinates of the current selected object can not be found in the tcl somewhere, but a reasonable value should be able to be found that will work for most everyone. The arrow key way would avoid that but I have yet to find where the arrow keys are dealt with and these may just go right to pd so a loop providing the correct number of shift+lefts/rights/ups/downs would be needed, but the logic for the arrow keys might be in the tcl somewhere, just lack any easy/obvious to grep for terms.

You could also make autopatching user switchable on the fly. Just bind an unused key combination to toggle it, so bind ctrl-shift-y or the like to toggle a variable between 1 and 0, use an if statement to determine what return does.

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Sat, 05 Feb 2022 03:02:18 GMT

seb-harmonik.ar — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 03:02:18 GMT

@oid in tcl/tk you can get the font height in pixels using

set foo [list $::font_family -$fsize $::font_weight]
set height [font metrics $foo -linespace]

(where $fsize is the size)
edit: I see there's also the ::font_metrics, ::font_zoom2_metrics, ::font_measured, and ::font_zoom2_measured arrays..

Reply to A GUI plugin adding Max hotkeys and UI feel to Pd vanilla on Tue, 12 Apr 2022 22:30:30 GMT

rvirmoors — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 22:30:30 GMT

just added the Ctrl+I shortcut to open the inspector (Properties) popup window

haha this was such a pain to figure out in Tcl... every time I add something it feels like learning it almost from scratch.

btw this shortcut is actually also a TODO in Pd's pd-gui.tcl, hmm...