Sort input pins

vvvv gamma feature
1

Hi.
It would be absolutely awesome to have an option / shortcut to sort the input pins of a Node - at least of a Process or similar - automatically by the X-Position of the connections.
The pins would automatically change their order:

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I think this would greatly improve the organization of patches.

2 Likes
2

It’s definitely a pain to re-order links on pin groups, but I wouldn’t like this to be dependent on the patch layout. People should feel free to mess around in their patches as they want to and it should not affect the logic of an application. Also it’s just sometimes the case that a data sink is located somewhere far away in the patch.

Instead I suggest draggable pins here!

And as a bonus - a pin automatically appearing when approaching a pin group with a link at hand, when there is no free pin group slot anymore.

1 Like
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Draggable Pins would also work for me. Or just any shortcut for automatic sorting. The crucial point is “ease of use”!

4

I guess it could be in Configure.

Maybe a list where you can order inputs and outputs as well as making them (in)visible

5

Yesterday some idea came up that almost feels too daring to suggest, but I’ll put it here anyway ;)
We’ve all been there: you have some node with a pingroup and aligned everything tidily with what’s upstream. Then you add another pin to the group, scale up the node horizontally to make some space for the new upstream node graph and all that effort that went into the organization of your patch goes to waste, because you’re forced to move stuff around again.
This is extra bad if the pingroup isn’t the node’s first input (for example Fuse compute stage groups with the first input being the buffer ressource). Then scaling the node up makes it even harder to adjust your node graph with the new input pins.
Also sometimes upstream node graphs have different horizontal spacing requirements.

So here goes my daring suggestion, I don’t know how this would actually feel when patching, but everything we know (and are used to) migt be wrong ;)
What about allowing pins on nodes to have irregular spacings?
To not bloat the VL XML I figure it could look something like this - the default would be regular spacing of course, and this would not need to populate any attributes in the XML.
Once you drag a pin around on the node, the irregular spacings are saved to the XML.
When you scale up a node that has irregular spacing, all pins move in their relative ratios to one another, so already equally spaced pins would behave as they already do.

I know this might sound like a lot, but maybe this will actually unlock quite some potential for organizing patches?

1 Like
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@sunep
A list, that can be ordered is not what I want, although it sound good - this is too slow. I want to quickly clean my patches and order the connections. It has to be something as quick and easy as dragging or snapping.