I would dearly love to be able to set a “grid snap” style setting on the Grasshopper canvas so that it would be much easier and faster to align components.
A simpler version of the grid snap options in Rhino would be perfect.
I have the AutoGraph plugin installed and was very excited to try it, but so far I haven’t been able to get it to conform to the layout pattern I prefer for my definitions.
A very simple grid snap is all I would like to see. As it is I find myself zooming in and out all the time to tweak component alignments. I know it makes no difference to the performance of my algorithms but it certainly makes a psychological difference to the readability of definitions when I see components aligned together cleanly.
since components tend to have very different dimensions and often even different spacing between the input and output grips, I doubt that a grid snap is going to be very useful. What is needed I think is an object snap, like the current horizontal wire snapping but much, much better. It needs to pay attention to multiple wires, horizontal and vertical spacing, left/right/centre alignment of components and probably a few more things.
However maybe I’m confused about your suggestion, how do you see this grid snap working? Is it tied to the visible grid on the canvas? What corners/points of components snap to which points?
Hi David, I can see from your reply that you’ve already put way more thought into this issue than i have, and I should just step back and offer encouragement for you to keep the issue in mind during your development work.
You’re bound to come up with something way cooler than what I was thinking of.
I was imagining something fairly crude, like the option to limit the component horizontal and vertical sizes to multiples of 5 pixels or 10 pixels or something like that. Then with say a 10 pixel grid snap function on it would be very easy to just line components up by eye like it is when you have grid snap on in a Rhino view.
I agree with the OP… Grid snap would be very helpful.
Most components are standard dimensions with consistently spaced wires on one side or the other.
Some components have different numbers of input/output wires, in this case, the wires connectors would need to obey with the grid dimensions so they’re evenly spaced, not spaced to fill the component.
Re-sizable components (e.g. Panel) will snap to grid dimensions.
Components with the ability to add/remove connectors (via the +/- buttons), will need to top align and grow/shrink from the bottom.
