Relays are underrated (feat. Enhancement wish)

[pekka.riihonen]

I love relays.
I wish to sing their praises because I feel I don’t see them around enough.
I use them a lot like variable names that comment themselves in scripts.

That said, I have a few enhancement wishes:

Let’s say I have a component with its input wires having relays upstream and at coordinates far far away.
If I want to copy their names to pass them onwards to the outputs of the component, I must first trek the canvas to reach the OG relay that contains the name for copy-pasting, or I have to resort to manually typing the names again (the horror!)

I wish I could somehow copy the name of a relay from its downstream relays with a shortcut key.

While I’m wishing: I wish by default a relay would inherit its ancestor’s nickname, parameter name or both.
Like this:

or like so:

If not by default then by way of a shortcut key.

Some components already do this in one way or another, such as the Cluster Input and Output -components:

… but the relay’s (nick)name doesn’t continue over from a ‘middle’ relay that has no name itself but is inheriting from its ancestor.

So I wish the inherited Nickname passed down by relays would be more deeply ingrained in the descendants, such that other components like Cluster Output can properly read and inherit them, and so that the user (me) can copy the nickname text outta them.

How 'bout it, eh, eh?

[pekka.riihonen]

While I’m pie-in-the-skying here, how about this:
I realised some components like “longest list” react to custom parameter names like this:

I kind of wish I could pass/route “wire-names” through components. Since it’s not inherently clear what input wire-name(s) should pass through to which output(s), this could we routed ‘within’ the component at the ZUI -zoom level. I try to demonstrate this with the GIF below.

I’d like it that by zooming in close enough, I could drag from within a component’s input parameter to its own output parameters and thus define an inheritance of ‘wire-names’ (the same as relay nicknames for all intents and purposes).

I wish for this to enhance the the way that relays already help with rapid ‘documentation’ of Grasshopper definitions on the fly. Like good variable names flowing through the document.

[Joseph_Oster]

I hate relays. They do nothing that a param component won’t do. Sometimes less.

[Baris]

You can get it quicker,than a param, maybe an advantage.
Tried to use them, when they were new, but never saw any reason to do so.

[Joseph_Oster]

@Baris

You can get it quicker,than a param

Get what? Are you saying that relays have a performance advantage over params? Maybe so but params are not where my code gets slow.

[Baris]

I meant putting them on the canvas, since it’s just a double-click on the wire