Is there a technical reason GH window has to be tied to Rhino?
It’s kindof annoying if for example you are trying to work with a spreadsheet on one monitor and GH on the other but Rhino has to jump to the foreground overtop of the spreadsheet when the GH window is made active. You can’t minimize Rhino or grasshopper goes away.
The GH window is launched as a child of the Rhino window. It have sense.
You have to put GH on the same monitor as Rhino. The other monitor for other things.
What I do is put all the rh panels and toolbars in one half of the screen (using the RH UI layout), and cover GH on top to only have GH, the viewport, and the console. To access the tools, I make the GH window less wide or minimize it.
You misunderstand.
I know the way we have to work around the sillyness.
I’m asking why we have to.
Why isn’t grasshopper a standalone application that establishes the live link when Rhino is open but otherwise you can work on formulas or UI or whatever with Rhino not even running. It just seems senseless having all these arbitrary screen real estate impositions.
Because others less smart than you have made this software. 
What can you run that depends on Rhino without Rhino running?
The windows are nested to improve the user experience, if you minimize the parent window all the child windows will be minimized instead of having to do it one by one. If the parent is closed, the others will be too. It makes sense to do it this way. It could not be like that, but the alternative would give other problems too, and there will be another guy crying for not understanding.
Extremely rare is the GH model that doesn’t produce geometry; there is no point if you can’t see that.
Of course. But you don’t need to be looking at the model wasting screen space a lot of the time. Especially painful when working remotely on just a laptop.
I was just making a point in that there could be no technical difference between an unfound referenced brep (or any geometry) and rhino not running at all. I mean obviously I don’t have a grip on what’s going on under the hood. I’m just saying as a user it’s annoying when programs don’t let you set up your interface how you want to. If it’s not strictly necessary technically then why do it?
“wynott” = “why not”?
It may be possible to launch the grasshopper window separately. It would fall behind the Rhino window all the time though, unless it was set to topmost in which case it would occlude everything else.
I’d have to see how that works with respect to minimisation etc.
awesome! many thanks David.
the other case is like when you’re trying to follow a video tutorial. there just isn’t room on a single screen to have rhino, grasshopper and the video playing so you end up having to like pause the video every 3 seconds and flop back and forth. if we could make rhino go away half grasshopper half tutorial video would be workable. same for if you are trying to paste a bunch of data from some external source. it just seems unnecessarily painful. like if I could have half grasshopper and half excel spreadsheet I could live with it. but at 1080 there just isn’t room for 3 applications and you spend all day travelling to the taskbar and back.
I almost never work on a single screen anymore these days. However I find that making grasshopper roughly the same size as the Rhino window and then just double clicking the grasshopper window title bar to fold and unfold the window let’s me switch between rh and gh pretty painlessly.
Phone auto-correct?
Yeah, the galaxy style dragging-your-fingers-over-the-keyboard auto detect. It often gets confused and inserts Dutch, German or Finnish words when I’m “typing” in English.
This is a bit of a digression, but on the broader subject of UI and how Rhino and Grasshopper relate, rhino almost becomes just a viewport.
I think we’re getting a bit lazy on UI stuff because monitors are so cheap now.
I want to build a workstation that is really compact and transmits HDMI wirelessly. Vision being you plug the box into an outlet in the corner at a cafe or bar and then sit for like 4 or 5 hours outside on the terrace using a portable monitor powered by usb-c lipo battery pack but have a quadro 8000 power.
Laptops with GPUs don’t have useful run time. It’s becoming a pointless form factor. The black box in this screenshot is my Lenovo P53 15" for size reference. The PSU is scaled to be dimensions of 1U 500W.
I purchased a separate ultra widescreen monitor specifically for grasshopper. Rhino on the laptop screen, grasshopper on the widescreen. The extra width is extra nice!
I understand technically why this happens (child window), but it’s a very confusing UX when you’re primarily working with grasshopper and not rhino. Perhaps the worst UX is being unable to command-` switch between rhino and grasshopper windows; this makes working on a single screen extremely painful.
I think it’s possible to disconnect GH window from Rhino. Will add into my plugin later.
