On Jan 7, 2013, at 9:27 AM, Rudy J. Richardson wrote:

Elaine,

Thanks. What I meant by "Edit" was a restructuring of the options on the toolbar akin to the standard structure found in many programs, e.g., File, Edit, View, ....

I realize such a radical restructuring is probably not feasible, and the more I use Chimera, the more accustomed I get to its menu structure.

Since the main interaction paradigm in Chimera is to select parts of a structure and perform actions on the selection, we chose to have the menu structure emphasize that paradigm rather than obscure it.  Where it made sense to us, we did try to retain more broadly-used menu ideas (e.g. the File and Help menus).

It is unfortunate, however, that a global "undo" function could not be implemented. For reference, this has recently been implemented in another molecular modeling program, YASARA; it is not able to undo everything, but for what it is able to undo, this feature is quite helpful.

Yes, we certainly agree that it would be desirable, but it is really hard to retrofit into the current design.  We will try to support undo better in Chimera 2.

--Eric

                        Eric Pettersen

                        UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

                        http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu