No, it can be docked as a panel, just like other panels such as Properties, Layers, etc.
Still, by default it’s a stand-alone pop-up window.
There is no default. Notes is not normally open in an out-of-the-box “default” Rhino workspace. You can open it by typing “notes” - in which case it opens floating - or you can right click the right side docked panels and check “notes”, in which case it is just a tab in the docked panels (talking V7 here). It’s not a popup either like Command History or What, it’s non-modal and can stay open all the time.
In any case it’s a panel, and it behaves like all the 31 other Rhino panels - it can be either docked or floating. The display tech used is probably the same for them all.
The two default ways to open Notes are:
- Evoke “Notes” from typing in the Command line. A Notes pop-up window appears.
- Click on the “Save” icon to open the linked pop-up menu, then click on the “Notes” icon. A Notes pop-up window appears.
What you described above is actually an optional customization, requiring to first open the “Properties” panel, then right-click on its tab bar (Rhino 8 WIP requires one extra step here: click on “Show panels”), then check “Notes” to show its own tab inside the “Properties” panel.
Neither of those 3 ways to open Notes will keep it visible while opening some text document (PDF, Notepad, Wordpad) or an image over the main window of Rhino to compare both contents, for example. Even worse, having a “Notes” tab inside the “Properties” panel forces Rhino to stop showing the customizable size of its pop-up window, making it very uncomfortable to work on a narrow window. Of course, one could expand the width of the “Properties” panel to make it extremely wide, but that comes at the cost of worse visibility on the viewport and messing around with the rest of the tabs there, especially while the former is docked to the side of the screen.
The two bugs described in this topic (unwanted automatic selection of the text and automatic scrolling to the bottom of the written content) are only related to the floating “Notes” window, which is why the code that needs to be fixed for “Notes” will not affect the other portion of its code related to its docked placement as an optional tab inside the “Properties” window.
I just checked; the notes panel in Rhino 8 was rewritten in a different user interface technology than what it was in Rhino 7. Much of the user interface in Rhino 8 is being replaced with a cross platform technology in order to maintain consistency across platforms; notes is one part of that user interface. If this gets fixed in Rhino 8, creating a fix for Rhino 7 would require completely different code than what would be needed for Rhino 8.
The last paragraph of my last post was referring a small portion of the code that needs to be rewritten, in order to fix the bug related to auto-selection of the user text and auto-scrolling to the bottom. The other portion of the code related to Notes in docked tab inside the “Properties” panel does not need any change. 
Nope. Here is the just-after-installation Rhino 7 layout:
Note the docked right hand side set of tabbed panels, which include Properties, Layers, Rendering, Materials, Library and CommandHelp. If you type any of those names, the active panel switches to that one, while still docked. Therefore another way to have Notes in the default workspace is to simply right click and add the Notes tab.
As said before, Notes is like any other panel. If it is not already docked, it opens floating. If it is already docked, it opens docked. The preference is sticky over sessions and stored in the settings file.
Dunno, that seems to work here…
The automatic selection bug is annoying, I agree. Seems to have been introduced some time in Rhino V6 (doesn’t happen in V5). There have been lots of issues with cursor focus in various panels - not only notes, but also layers, etc., where the focus either went to the command line or main Rhino window when it should have been in the panel - and vice-versa. Perhaps the auto-selection phenomenon is related to one or more of the attempted fixes for that. Hopefully V8’s completely new setup will make all that disappear.
“Notes” is unlike any other panel, because it’s all about writing text inside its whole field, whereas the rest panels are more or less options, numerical bars and tickboxes.
Your screen-shot shows a docked “Properties” panel, but I rarely see Rhino users who keep it that way, because they prefer to take advantage of the larger viewports and either make it floating and as small as possible or close it entirely and open it in rare occasions only when it’s needed. Make the “Properties” panel floating and you will notice that it has the unwanted behaviour I described in my post above.
That’s not what I see. Most users have at least Properties and Layers open and docked because they use them all the time.
2 Likes
Looks like we see different things, maybe because of the different kind of workflows used by the users in different fields. I can’t agree with your statement “all the time”. The “Layers” tab is only needed while creating new layers, switching to another current layer, selecting all objects inside a certain layer or moving object(s) to another layer. All of those tasks are fairly rare and quick to execute compared to the time spent in actual modeling. The same goes for the rare use of “Object Properties”, mostly related to changing the colour of objects, naming them or applying a custom mesh.
As I mentioned before, making the “Properties” panel docked is not usable for writing or reading text in the “Notes” placed as a tab there, because it forces the text inside to expand vertically due to the minimal width of the text field. Expanding the whole “Properties” panel is not a solution, because it eats up the viewport. It does not fix the annoying bugs that make the use of floating “Notes” pop-up window a real pain.
Yes you do…for users in certain incredibly popular fields in which Rhino is used, keeping your layers organized is like half your job.
1 Like
to bring this back to the original issue, the text is not simply being scrolled to the bottom – if you leave some portion of text selected, then you will see that what is actually happening, is that it is doing a “scroll selection into view” when the focus comes back to rhino
and when there is no text selection, it is first selecting all text, and then scrolling it into view, which results in it scrolling to the bottom – but it will also happily scroll up rather than down, depending what is selected
therefore a partial workaround for the time being is to leave selected some portion of the text that you would prefer to have scrolled into view
How many time you or the Rhino users you know spend on clicking on the layers or object properties compared to working inside the viewport? While working, say, 8 hours per day, I spend no more than 2-5 minutes total time doing something in the “Properties” panel and its tabs, while the rest 7:55-7:58 hours I spend on actual 3d modeling. And, yes, I do organize my work by properly placing my objects in lots of layers ans sub-layers.
@Rhino_Bulgaria, how many layers does your typical Rhino file have?
another observation & workaround, you said you lost a bunch of notes because of a misplaced keystroke – most edit controls have a built-in undo buffer, and the notes panel is one, but I find it has a strange and unfortunate behavior: if you right-click > undo, it will not work, and your prior state will be lost, but it will work if you use ctrl+z
probably not an easy one to remember in the moment, but good to know
Depends on the type of project. A lamp or a chair typically consist just a few layers, whereas a complex building may have hundreds or even thousands of layers. I just opened the file with the last supercar I designed and roughly it consists 105 layers and 19 of those layers have their own sub-layers. The first layer has 38 sub-layers, for example. It took me 6 years to create all the 3d models inside that file.
By the way, I can’t find any counter tool to calculate the exact number of layers and sub-layers in a file. Would be handy to have one.
1 Like
the audit command will tell the total number of layers
1 Like
Thank you, that’s cool to know! But it only calculates the combined number of layers and sub-layers, rather than giving two separate numbers for those. Anyway, here is what the “Audit” command said about the file I mentioned above:
Document Manifest:
Texture Mapping: 1 active, 1 system.
Material: 8115 active, 2 system.
Line Pattern: 6 active, 3 system.
Layer: 233 active, 1 system.
Group: 3957 active.
TextStyle: none.
Annotation Style: 10 active, 12 system.
Light: none.
Hatch Pattern: 9 active, 9 system.
Block: 117 active.
Model Geometry: 50822 active.
Total: 63270 model components. 28 system components.
Audit Summary:
Table tally:
233 layers
117 instance definitions
10 annotation styles
0 fonts
6 linetypes
8115 rendering materials
Object tally:
37155 normal objects
18 locked objects
11495 hidden objects
0 deleted objects (in undo buffer)
2154 block definition objects
0 reference normal objects
0 reference locked objects
0 reference hidden objects
0 reference block definition objects
No errors.
no idea, best guess, there is some internal default layer used for who knows what, and it is reported here as system