10-03-2020, 12:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-03-2020, 12:42 PM by sciroccorics.)
You're right, a full macro/scripting mechanism would be a great addition to Wings, but this would be a tremendous amount of work for a software with such a small team of developpers. And you are also right when suggesting that learning Erlang would be a nice goal for me 
as I would be very proud if I could propose some plugins or extensions for this wonderful piece of software that I really like very much. But for the moment, no enough free time in my life, well, at least for 2 or 3 months. I hope that constraints will be lighter at work in a couple of months...
To come back to the hotkey request. Actually, the bindings that I set up in my Wings configuration, redefine more that 90% of the standard bindings. As I mainly use Wings on my laptop with the integrated touchpad, I use the "Maya" camera mode which is MUCH easier to use than the "Wings3D" or "Blender" mode when the middle mouse button is missing (actually, I've configured my touchpad to perform MMB actions when simultaneously pressing LMB+RMB, but that's still a painful operation to be employed for frequent operations). So all my bindings follow the "Maya philosophy" : pressing 'Alt' means that you want to move the camera, releasing 'Alt' means that you want to edit your model. So I redefined all camera related stuff to hotkeys prefixed with 'Alt', which lets plenty of single keys (R,X,Y,Z,A....) to be reused for more common operations. At the end, this provides a very productive workflow, even when controlled by a good-old touchpad without multi-touch features. But of course, that's my way of thinking, I don't urge anybody to take my opinion as the ultimate one.
I agree with you that multiple actions can always be obtained by combining sequential keystrokes (that is what I'm using currently) but being able to simply chain two operations in the configuration file (I don't really need a full macro scripting solution) would offer such a great improvement in the way I use Wings3D. As I said previously, hacking the "preferences.txt" config file doesn't frighten me : to include all my new bindings, I simply added lines in that file with a text editor, instead of adding them one by one with the user interface.
When looking at the syntax of the key binding lines, you have a common pattern:
{{bindkey,{"keycode",["keymods"]}},{"menuname","menuentry"},user}.
where all quoted words are replaced by the corresponding value for each binding. I've tried to create a chain of 2 actions by hacking the file using the following syntax:
{{bindkey,{"keycode",["keymods"]}},{{"menuname1","menuentry1"},{"menuname2","menuentry2"}},user}.
but it does not work...
Maybe it's the "user" keyword that is not longer at the correct position (I don't know what the "user" keyword means in that context), or maybe it's just that the parser can only handle one menu entry. That's why I called for some hints on the forum...
as I would be very proud if I could propose some plugins or extensions for this wonderful piece of software that I really like very much. But for the moment, no enough free time in my life, well, at least for 2 or 3 months. I hope that constraints will be lighter at work in a couple of months...To come back to the hotkey request. Actually, the bindings that I set up in my Wings configuration, redefine more that 90% of the standard bindings. As I mainly use Wings on my laptop with the integrated touchpad, I use the "Maya" camera mode which is MUCH easier to use than the "Wings3D" or "Blender" mode when the middle mouse button is missing (actually, I've configured my touchpad to perform MMB actions when simultaneously pressing LMB+RMB, but that's still a painful operation to be employed for frequent operations). So all my bindings follow the "Maya philosophy" : pressing 'Alt' means that you want to move the camera, releasing 'Alt' means that you want to edit your model. So I redefined all camera related stuff to hotkeys prefixed with 'Alt', which lets plenty of single keys (R,X,Y,Z,A....) to be reused for more common operations. At the end, this provides a very productive workflow, even when controlled by a good-old touchpad without multi-touch features. But of course, that's my way of thinking, I don't urge anybody to take my opinion as the ultimate one.
I agree with you that multiple actions can always be obtained by combining sequential keystrokes (that is what I'm using currently) but being able to simply chain two operations in the configuration file (I don't really need a full macro scripting solution) would offer such a great improvement in the way I use Wings3D. As I said previously, hacking the "preferences.txt" config file doesn't frighten me : to include all my new bindings, I simply added lines in that file with a text editor, instead of adding them one by one with the user interface.
When looking at the syntax of the key binding lines, you have a common pattern:
{{bindkey,{"keycode",["keymods"]}},{"menuname","menuentry"},user}.
where all quoted words are replaced by the corresponding value for each binding. I've tried to create a chain of 2 actions by hacking the file using the following syntax:
{{bindkey,{"keycode",["keymods"]}},{{"menuname1","menuentry1"},{"menuname2","menuentry2"}},user}.
but it does not work...
Maybe it's the "user" keyword that is not longer at the correct position (I don't know what the "user" keyword means in that context), or maybe it's just that the parser can only handle one menu entry. That's why I called for some hints on the forum...
>>> sciroccorics <<<