Placement indicator is a bit confusing

Rhino Rhino for Windows
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Hi McNeel staff,

I’m on Rhino 8 SR2 (8223346.13001, 2023-12-12) and I noticed some weird behaviour in the Containers window found under Window > Containers > Manage containers…


(Please ignore the overlay of my second display that shows the streaming software)

The video above and images below illustrate what I find odd about the placement indicator:

Placing Snapshots here:
image
:arrow_down: drops Snapshots above Properties:
image

Whereas placing Snapshots where the blue line indicator is here:
image
:arrow_down: Drops it above notes:
image
This behaviour does not make sense to me since it makes more sense for it to stay in place, or for the indicator to not appear at all.

Also, highlighting an item in blue feels visually misleading since that usually means that you can place a dragged item inside the selected item, so I’m not sure what its function serves in the context of trying to drop on an item (but dropping on a container adds the item so that does make sense)

Here is a video example of Notion’s desktop app that makes more sense to me:

Also, dragging something into a container does not drop the item where the indicator is actually indicating. Dropping ‘Named CPlanes’ places the item above Notes regardless of whether Notes is highlighted or if there is the line indicator under it (indicating placing the item underneath Notes):

2

For the record, the blue placement indicator in the Layers toolbar works as expected.

That said, there are two issues I’ve noticed with the blue placement indicator on the layer tab.

  1. The position of the blue indicator tab is only dictated by the vertical location of the cursor but does not get affected by the horizontal position of the cursor (shown at the beginning of the video)

  2. There is no way to get a sub-layer out of its parent layer using the blue indicator (since the cursor tooltip goes from the move layer with the blue indicator in the sub-layer directory straight to the red :no_entry_sign: no-go icon instead of giving the option to drop the layer in the parent directory and then changing to a red no-go)

I think these unintuitive interactions could be fixed if the location of the blue indicator was dictated by both vertical and horizontal cursor locations instead of just the vertical one as it seems to be now.

It’s a small thing, but it’s various small things like these that make Rhino 8 feel less fleshed out than I guess both users and developers would like it to be.

3

Hi Vince - thanks for the feedback, I’ll see if we can tune this up.
Here’s a start
RH-79358 Containers UI - better feedback

-Pascal

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