GH2 Wish: polyline wires + snapping as native functions

Serengeti (Rhino WIP) Grasshopper2
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Hi,

Since GH2 is introducing a lot of new UI features, as well as breaking compatibility with existing add-ons, I’d like to mention a couple of features that I find extremely useful and that, at the moment, are perfectly solved by a couple of add-ons:

1 - Polyline wires

This display option - which is made avilable by the Riched Wires Types add-on (https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/riched-wire-types) - allows to display wires as polylines.

Apart from the aesthetics - I find it cleaner and more attractive but this is subjective - this option makes much easier to follow the connections, especially for long wires and multiple wires starting from the same component - below is an example:

2022-04-14 - GH polyline wires example
2022-04-14 - GH polyline wires example1371×729 133 KB

2 - Canvas Snapping

Right now this is solved very well by SnappingGecko (https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/snappinggecko) which allows to easily align components based on their borders or the wire input/output points.

Both the add-ons work very well even with very large definitions.

Obviously the developers may decide to update them and make them compatible with GH2, however for now I just wanted to emphasize how these functionalities really make a difference in the organization and layout of the definitions, so maybe it would be worth considering the integration of similar functions natively into GH2.

Thank you!

Marco

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+1 for both of these ideas, especially the Canvas Snapping.

I hope GH2 will be able to have integer-based component sizes and component positions. I’m making an assumption here based on David’s comment about floating point canvas positions in another thread.

I find it very frustrating in GH1 that after carefully aligning everything the simple act of dragging groups of components around on the canvas gradually messes up their alignments with each other.

I think that laying out our definitions neatly is a big part of the satisfaction of node-based programming.

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Topmostviweport

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Didn’t know about this, thanks for mentioning it, very useful indeed!

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I agree. Having a canvas grid snapping would make it easier to align components. Blender’s Node Editor has something like this, however the great thing about SnappingGecko is that it allows to align the inputs/outputs so that the wires can be perfectly horizontal independently of the components actual height.

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