If you think of it as a problem in the English language, yes.
Last week I was thinking about implementing a command search which lets you filter by what you have and what you want.
Example problems expressed in English (probably easiest to implement with dropdowns and such):
“Show me all commands which accept curves and produce a surface.”
“Are there any commands which accept two surfaces and two curves? How about two surfaces and one curve?”
For Steve’s problem:
“What commands select layers?”
“What commands act on layers?”
etc.
You can start typing any command in the commandline, and it will autocomplete suggestions for you, maybe this is helpful. I’m not 100% sure if this is in v5 too, screenshot below is from v8.
not actually a bad idea if it’s trained on the contents of the help file and fora then you ask an appropriately leading question
I think the real need* would be quite reasonable to implement in Rhino or in the online help in a way similar to the filters on Food4Rhino searches: one way would be checkboxes for what you have and what you want to come out of the function (curves, breps, SubD’s, general surfaces, etc. separately for input and for output)
*my interpretation of the real need is “user provides information about what they have and what they want to happen as the result of a command”, not “user provides their mangled English guess at what a McNeel dev might have named the Rhino command they want if they implemented one and a linguistics package tries to figure out what similar mangled English commands actually exist”
I really like the idea of having an easier access to commands (you do not know or cant remember the name)…
I posted a similar Idea “Meat-Commands” here
… sweep1 will become sweep2 if you select additional profiles / shapes
… sweep1 will become railrevolve if you add an axis
… sweep2 will become networksrf if you add more curves in rail-direction
… and so on
and a filter on
input, action, output (see linked post)
in general:
I also like the Idea (not sure where i posted it), that the fuzzy-command-suggestion in the commandline depend on selection.
if a curve is Selected - for example - only commands that work with curves as input should be suggested.
I think the the general question behind this topic is, how to get an overview / access to what commands exists - this also applies to all great Developer options. And for this part I would love to see some kind of mapping-Table
I’ve wanted this for a while on the Command and RhinoCommon side.
The RhinoCommon side is very well defined with whatever data McNeel has that they build the online help from.
I hope that the command side has an equivalent behind the scenes structure which makes it easy to pull data from: basically that they have an internal high level language command compiler rather than code each command up the same way we would in RhinoCommon or C++.
Hi, V5
Perhaps an online database where we can submit a command and the wording we were looking for that after much gnashing of teeth we found the command for.
TweenCurves
curves equally distibuted apart.
No one would ever think of the word Tween. except McNeel.
Is an example.
One could access the online database, then select the command and enter the wording that is appropriate.
a user seaarches on AND function or the OR function., or both
enter …curve OR line AND distribute OR array OR blend OR splay AND apart OR evenly and have those words put by the contributor in cells to the right of TweenCurve.
Something like that !
Maybe a user can do a private website and such a database.
Yet again I wish we users had created an online database. using common words and it would show the command.
I need to keep curve length and straighten the curve out a bit.
I type into the search system straighten curve keep length.
and find the command because someone has already put keywords straighten, length retain, keep, in a Rhino thesaurus for that command.
Can we not have something searchable online doing this ?
and just what command straightens out a curve keeping its length the same ?
Length to measure curve length
Change the curve shape to desired shape Length to check length
If too short Extend SubCrv to shorten to length of original curve
