#106 Add pd-extended GUI improvements to pd-vanilla

[Albert Graef]

It would be nice to have the following GUI improvements from pd-extended in vanilla:

- The pd-extended color scheme for objects, inlets, outlets and wires. IMHO these give important visual cues which make it easier to work with Pd, especially for beginners.

- An option in the Edit menu to toggle autopatching. It's very convenient if the user can change this on the fly while running Pd.

- jsarlo's "magic glass". In edit mode this allows you to point the mouse at a wire to peek at the data passing through the wire. This is toggled with a corresponding option in the Edit menu. This is also very convenient, and IMHO a great tool for learning Pd.

I've compiled a patch from the corresponding 3 changesets in the patch_series branch of the pd-extended git repository, which applies cleanly on top of the pure-data git repository (as of 2011-04-19). I've also fixed some 64 bit related issues with magic glass, this is included in the patch.

[Albert Graef]

Patch to add GUI improvements from pd-extended to vanilla Pd

[Anonymous]

How does one make use of this?

[IOhannes m zmölnig]

use patch to apply the patch to the source-code of vanilla and recompile. (this is a different kind of patch than a Pd-patch)

[Albert Graef]

That patch is from 2011. I doubt that it still applies cleanly to the current git sources.

Were the suggested changes ever considered at all? I still consider these useful. Color schemes are always a matter of taste, of course, but the autopatching menu option and jsarlo's magic glass are clearly improvements that all vanilla users could benefit from, and they don't get in the way if you're not using them.

[Anonymous]

Hi Albert, this is a great endeavor! I hope your improvements will finally find their way into Pd.

I tried your patch, but it failed as expected. Tried to modify the patch manually, but it got corrupted.

I put the color scheme information directly into pd-gui.tcl, but it did nothing.

# color scheme
set ::canvas_fill "white"
set ::text_color "#000"
...

Is there any chance of a new patch or maybe a gui plugin for the color scheme?
Any hints how i could get done it on my own?

Appreciate your ideas!

[Albert Graef]

Anonymous, first, the contents of the patch is not my work, I simply put together some of the GUI improvements that were available in Pd-Extended at the time. I doubt that any of it will make it into vanilla any time soon. So I can't offer an updated patch, sorry.

If you want to try a current Pd flavor with a bunch of GUI improvements, I'd suggest you try Jonathan Wilkes' Purr-Data (which is based on Virginia Tech's Pd-L2Ork, which in turn started as a fork of Christoph Steiner's Pd-Extended). It rips out the old-school Tcl/Tk GUI in favor of a node webkit / JavaScript GUI implementation. It's still in beta right now, but is working great already and I'm using it for all my teaching now. You can find Jonathan's packages for Jessie, Ubuntu 16.04, macOS and Windows at https://git.purrdata.net/jwilkes/purr-data-binaries/tree/master. I also maintain some packages for Arch and various Ubuntu releases, you can find information about and links to these at http://l2orkaur.bitbucket.org/ and http://l2orkubuntu.bitbucket.org/.

[Albert Graef]

SourceForge messed up that link, here is it again: https://git.purrdata.net/jwilkes/purr-data-binaries/tree/master