Multitude of plugins, UserObject addons and custom layout

I have many grasshopper addons installed. I find it quite frustrating that many of them consists of one to ten components and most often than not they open a new tab, not using the Extra tab. I made a custom layout for myself that will rearrange things for me so it can fit in a halved screen (the way many of us work on single screen).
I was disappointed to find that addons like Ladybug, Honeybee, mesh(+) that are scripted with UserObjects fail to load in custom layouts.

http://snag.gy/SA1wB.jpg
this makes the layout managing system completely non-functional for me.
Is there a fix for this? What is your way of managing multitude of addons?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 25, 2015 at 2:52pm

The layout manager is almost entirely useless in my opinion. It was designed initially to give teachers a way to manage the exposure of components for their students, by hiding icons. It is clear to me now that that is both (A) a far too limited goal and (B) has been implemented in a really ham fisted way. I don't think any improvements will be made to it though for GH1, I'd rather get on with making it better in GH2.

My initial idea for layouts is to stop using a visual editor altogether, and instead have layouts be a set of text commands. For example, a layout file could look like this:

Hide HoneyBee.*.*

Hide Params.Util.GenePool

Move Display.Colour.* to Params.Colour.*

There'd be a few commands like move, hide, rename, etc. and a wildcard way to identify specific icons, panels and tabs. All commands in each layout file are executed sequentially, as are all loaded layout files. This makes layouts a lot more flexible, but also a lot more geeky, which is probably fine because the target group for custom layouts is expert users.

I'm also unhappy with the UserObject approach taken in GH1. I'm going to try and make UserObjects more integral and more flexible in GH2. For one I'd like to be able to have a single UserObject represent a collection of wired up components, rather than just one.

Lastly, the ribbon UI does not deal well with large amounts of tabs. This is absolutely a problem and I have absolutely no idea yet how to fix it.

Permalink Reply by Dimitar Baldzhiev on April 26, 2015 at 2:09am

I expected an answer like that, but thanks anyway! Wish you luck with figuring out this interface problem. What I did is to keep most of the rarely used modules in a zip file in my Libraries folder and load them manually on demand. (not the most elegant solution)
Right now from what I understand the Settings-Solver-Plug-in loading panel gives an option to load protect certain modules but after that it gives a prompt every time you start gh.

Thanks!

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