The spacebar used to open the radial menu in the previous version of GH. This was a very handy shortcut. Can we get this back?
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thanks for the link… looks like there’s a hack to get it back. though i have to say this change is fucking retarded.
ideally, with anything like this, there should be an option to set it however you want
i’m also a big fan of Revit’s two letter shortcuts. could be a handy way to access frequent components
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You should respond to the thread I linked. David is already there.
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I’m everywhere. “Fucking retarded” got it.
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def not, although personally I find that change an awkward one (probably because after about 5+ years of using space for radial menu it’s hard to lose the muscle memory) However, it is your software.
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Well… the change was made in response to user requests, I didn’t even think of it. I do fully appreciate people will come down on either side of it, in my own experience the popup-box is a far more common UI element than the radial menu so making it more easily accessible made sense to me.
Also the radial menu necessitates a mouse click to do anything once on screen, so having it pop up by way of middle-mouse-button seemed to fit the paradigm.* Not to mention most of the functionality available through the radial menu is also available through short-cuts.
* I know some people lack a mouse with an MMB.
Yea the logic totally makes sense, it’s just hard to retrain the brain to do something it was doing many times a day for years subconsciously . That said I prefer to get used to the new way rather than manually remap the keys - better to get with the times.
If I made it an option then you would have toggled it instead of coming here and voice your disapproval. This is the only way for me to get a sense of how my users feel about certain decisions. In general I’m no big fan of option-creep, but especially when making changes to existing patterns it destroys any potential useful feedback.
If this turns out to be one of those things where large groups of people simply cannot agree, then an option can be added, but until then I’d rather not.
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I think you nailed it, can’t agree more haha
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FWIW I found this change great. It agrees with the operator search menu in Blender popping up when pressing spacebar.
David, this belief is deeply flawed because it ignores the pain factor users must endure. It’s the equivalent of a waiter routinely removing favorite dishes from your table and substituting alternatives as a way of testing new recipes. The quality of the experience is far below expectations. There are less disruptive ways.
Just as idea for the future. A bit like adobe. After an update with a change like that, a pop up message appears. Describing shortly the „major“ change with an option, to stay with old behavior or to switch to new one.
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I know we disagree on this, at least to an extent. I think your analogy is somewhat strained though, wouldn’t it be more like a restaurant removing and adding new dishes to the menu? If you really like their Chicken Kiev and one day there’s Szechuan Duck in its place, you will be justifiably upset and may well complain to the waiter, but the alternative is either (a) nothing ever changes or (b) you end up with a menu which lists all possible combinations of all the ingredients the restaurant stocks and you have to spend half an hour just reading through endless permutations of olives, ham, salami, pepperoni, artichokes, onion, pineapple, mozzarella, sardines, capers, and bacon until you finally find the pizza you like. Which then of course ends up being the Calzone, so you weren’t done after all.
My ideal software has no options. That’s a pipe-dream, I know, but it gives me something to aim at.
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My ideal software has no options. That’s a pipe-dream, I know, but it gives me something to aim at.
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Yeah I think Apple’s approach ( to Mac OSX in the past, at least) is kinda the best of both worlds - expose the bare minimum of options in the UI to make things simple and intuitive out of the box, but at the same time provide deep support for under-the-hood tinkering and productivity enhancements for power users.
Personally I’d be fine with hand-editing a JSON or .config text file stashed away somewhere in the AppData folders; the threshold may be different for other people but raw XML…? That’s crossing a little into “complete hack” territory , stuff that’s not intended for human eyes and too easy to break syntatically 
More interestingly though, why the huge difference in UX philosophy between Grasshopper and its “host” application? It must be pretty jarring for users coming from Rhino where the settings page has 5000 different knobs and switches, with the basic expectation to be able to define custom macros and aliases for just about any workflow.
I’m constantly reminded of this when switching back and forth between the two environments, having to go from the flow-state of using personalized 1-3 letter Rhino aliases, to second-guessing the random order which things pop up in the GH search box. ( actually ended up uninstalling the TreeSloth plugin just because of the way it was interfering with common searches)
( actually ended up uninstalling the TreeSloth plugin just because of the way it was interfering with common searches)
could be nice if there is an alternate shortcut. Since “space = search” and “ctrl+space = radial menu” maybe something like “alt+space” could do a native component only search.
Different people in charge. Also Rhino is much older, much bigger, and has been developed by a fairly large team, whereas GH UI is just one person.
Feature and option creep are discussed for Rhino, and everyone seems to dislike it, but in the end taking a risk seems to be harder to justify when it’s the company’s money-maker and there’s 50 colleagues and 50 times more users who might get mad at you.
One reason I’m rewriting GH2 from scratch is not just that the code is becoming unmaintainable and unimprovable, but that it will give me a chance to get rid of 10 years of bad UI and feature decisions.
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Alt is tricky because Windows assigns it menu functionality. Would prefixing the search with a custom character also work as an option? This is already implemented for the # prefix, maybe tick or underbar? Period?
Underscore might be a good option, given the semantics of “canonical name” that is attached to Rhino commands?
But much more powerful would be the option to specify custom aliases, eg.
“P3” => Populate 3D
“SFP” => Surface From Points
etc.
and have those be privileged in the search box so you can call it up and type the characters instantly without having to look and confirm.