Custom Grasshopper Ribbon layouts

Because of this discussion, I started typing on a customizable ribbon layout for Grasshopper. First test (it worked right away! must be the heavy coffee smells in Arlanda Airport Starbucks...):

The basic idea is this:

- If no custom layouts are defined, the default layout is used.

- If even a single custom is defined, the default layout is discarded.

- Any number of custom layouts can be active at any time.

- A single layout defined a collection of Tabs, Panels and Items.

- The order of Tabs can be specified, but the order of Panels and Icons is always alphabetic (just like it is now)

- Items can be grouped though into Panel sub-sections, separated by the vertical fading etches.

- If two layouts define the same Tab or Panel, items will be merged.

- Layouts are stored in xml files and can be loaded simply by dragging them into Grasshopper. I don't know how I'm going to let you remove loaded layouts yet.

- Layouts can of course also be managed from the SDK, so they can be changed at any time by any code running inside the Grasshopper framework.

I also don't have a layout editor yet, I'm currently making layouts through code (hence the VB component).

The main problems I see with this approach are:

- It's not possible to easily create a reduction of the default layout. Even though it would be trivial to automatically create a custom layout that mimics the default layout, it is not possible to specifically hide certain tabs or panels or items.

- It's not possible to define the order of Panels within tabs and Items within panels.

- Your lovingly crafted layout might get screwed up by any other layout that is also loaded. Especially if it's loaded before yours, the order of Tabs (assuming there are overlapping Tabs) is no longer guaranteed.

- The Markov and Popup Search still display all components. Not sure if this is a good or a bad thing yet, though I lean towards good.

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David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Arlanda Airport, Sweden