why doesn't GH have undo?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by WT4 on October 7, 2009 at 7:16am

One reason, I think is that Grasshopper has so many components with different attributes that storing all the intermediate steps will be huge. I am using a program called ANSYS which does not have an Undo for the same reason. The only UNDO is saving the file before issuing the next command that you are not sure off which is what David is doing at the moment for Grasshopper

Permalink Reply by Ognek Kciroks on October 7, 2009 at 7:43am

i see.. thank you very much.
this was the same for generative components as well.
is this the true reason? just a bit doubtful about the file-size reasoning when considering really small simple files.
i must say though, as a result i've began losing touch with undo-ing -- could this be a positive development?

Permalink Reply by Arthur Mamou-Mani on October 7, 2009 at 7:47am

It d be great if GH could have an autosave like Rhino in case of crash.
Also GH could do temporary saves which would re-open when you press ctr+Z. These temp saves would self-erase after a while...

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on October 7, 2009 at 8:11am

I would attribute it more to an undo system being some what cumbersome to implement and manage rather than the size of the immediate steps or the number of components available. Also, considering the "volatility" of grasshopper, in terms of the changes made from release to release, having an undo system would likely be a lot of maintenance and slow down development. Now that there's much more about grasshopper that's solidified, and there are many more people using it, I believe David's begun to devote some time to figuring out how to get this implemented.

Permalink Reply by Ognek Kciroks on October 7, 2009 at 11:49am

thank you arthur, damien for your feedback.
it makes sense because there are 'undo' and 'redo' commands tentatively placed already.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 7, 2009 at 2:37pm

Damien is right (as usual), the problem is not the amount of data that has to be stored (it's actually very little), the problem is making sure that it gets stored at the right time. I chose to make the Grasshopper document class fairly open, which means that it's difficult (and often impossible) to track changes.

So either I have to make practically ALL operations undo-aware, or I have to start bottlenecking access to the document. Either will take a long time.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA