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.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Arlanda Airport, Sweden

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Diederik Veenendaal on May 22, 2012 at 3:03am

Did you solve this?

I'm having the same problem. The weird thing is, I've had a custom layout before which worked, but after an overhaul I get the same. Indeed, the file permissions are not the answer.

If I delete the custom layout(s), I do get the User tab with Default panel and all the User Objects I made, but within a custom layout they disappear after reloading Rhino and Grasshopper. In the layout editor the buttons say "Unknown Object - This object has not been loaded and is an unknown instance of Grasshopper"

Permalink Reply by Diederik Veenendaal on May 22, 2012 at 3:17am

Ok, well, at Lorenz Lachauer's suggestion I just don't use the custom layouts. Instead when I (re)create User Objects, I assign any panel or tab I want (doesn't have to exist) and it will appear and stay there. This will work fine for me as a work-around.

Permalink Reply by phillip on May 22, 2012 at 6:41am

Still same here. I guess, this is due to some windows admin privilege thing, since I am on an office machine. Tryed changing privileges in different folders (and even switched to admin account), but coulnd´t figure out a way to make it work...

Best,

Phillip

Permalink Reply by phillip on August 8, 2012 at 2:35am

Hi David,

was hoping it would "solve it self", but also in 0.9 I am still facing the problem, If I want to use RibbonLayouts all UserObjects will be gone.

This is on all of my machines and I can´t figure out why.

The UserObjects are all in the standart folder (C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Grasshopper\UserObjects)

Still think this is a great feature and I would love to use it.

Is there anything I can try to fix this?

Thanks,

Phillip

Attachments:

hallotest.ghlayout, 346 KB

Permalink Reply by Annie W on December 20, 2012 at 7:54am

Hey,

I'm having the same issue! Did you find a solution for that?

Anne

Permalink Reply by DoradoZYL on September 5, 2014 at 5:22am

Hi phillip I have the same problem with you, and your problem is now solved?

Permalink Reply by phillip on September 6, 2014 at 5:16am

Hopefully this is not personal.

Regarding the ribbon layouts though: no - still unsolved.

Permalink Reply by TheChosenOne on December 20, 2012 at 8:35am

I am also interested in the topic.

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on June 13, 2015 at 5:03am

User objects are still unusable with custom ribbon layouts?!

Is there any workaround?

Permalink Reply by Maximilian Trippner on April 20, 2017 at 6:50am

same problem, anybody has a solution yet?

Permalink Reply by Maximilian Trippner on April 20, 2017 at 7:47am

alright misunderstanding... Custom ribbon layout is empty when I restart Rhino/GH. Same problem philip described a few years ago:)

Permalink Reply by Maximilian Trippner on April 20, 2017 at 8:04am

Just user objects... actually i've no skills at all with visual studio or programming in general, is there some tutorial which explains it a little bit ?...