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  • Published 8 Aug 2022

Highlight and select node wires

When detaching wires from a node input/output, it would be a great improvement being able to select and drag them by clicking on any point of the wire, and not just by their ends.

highlight.png

As I show in the points below, there are a couple of problems with the current system of detaching them.

Problem #1 Screenshot_4.png Especially with the newly introduced Join Geometry node in the GN editor, when facing a situation where many wires are connected to the node input, it's hard to click and drag the correct wire, and many times either the wrong wire is detached, or the user is forced to zoom very close to the node in order to be sure of what wire is selecting, especiay because there's no visual feedback of it until it's already detached.

Problem #2 tw.png When we need to detach a wire from a node output instead, you also have to hold Ctrl, otherwise instead of detaching it you will generate a new one to connect. The big problem of this is that if there is more than one wire connected to the output, holding Ctrl and dragging will detach all of them , with no possibility to choose a specific one.

SOLUTION highlight.png Being able to select a wire on any point of it: a highlight on hover will show which wire we're selecting, and depending on which extremity (right or left) the mouse is closer to, we'll detach it from its input or output with much more ease and awareness.

90%

Development Status: Open

Upvote 9 Downvote 1
slowk1d
8 Aug 2022

6 Comments

jeroenbakker

Hi, thanks for the idea. Just want to mention a small tweak. When selecting the whole noodle it would select both ends. I do think that only the closest end to the mouse click should be selected otherwise you don't know what you're dragging/working with.

3
slowk1d Author

Hi Jeroen Bakker, thanks for replying! I don't know if I understood correctly, but what you propose is exactly what I mean as well: I don't know exactly the coding side of it, but I imagine that every wire would have an invisible "middle point", and depending on either you click on the right or left side of it, you'll will detach the input or the output, not the whole wire. Thanks for your interest in this!

jeroenbakker

Excellent and seems like we are on the same page.

1
claus

I like this a lot, expanding the active area for grabbing a noodle a certain amount of pixels towards the middle of it seems like a great QoL improvement.

1
thinsoldier

Whoever thought that expanding sausage was a good idea needs to be punished.

1
claus

probably a German, they like their bratwurst.