On Jan 22, 2009, at 3:15 PM, Eric Pettersen wrote:
On Jan 21, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Matthew Dougherty wrote:
1) ability to create folders in the model panel so models can be grouped 2) ability to have a model in multiple folders 3) ability to show/hide in a folder by a a single checkbox 4) ability to name the folder
These are good suggestions, and we have discussed adding some kind of grouping mechanism in Chimera given that there are a lot of situations where you want to treat a set of models as a single entity (e.g. multiple structures fit into a EM map).
I think #2 and #3 are in conflict though. Really, I don't think you want #2 -- it's too confusing. Say a model is in two groups: you close one group -- what happens? You hide one group -- what happens? You deactivate one group and move the other -- what happens? Perhaps if you elaborated on the motivation for putting a model in multiple groups then some other alternative could be devised that provides what you need.
I'll open a change-request in our Trac database for "grouping mechanism" and include the above. I don't really want to promise a timeline, but the issue is a concern of ours. Seems like I never opened that ticket, at least I can't find it searching the database. A year later I did open a very similar ticket (#8253) which has now been implemented. So the Model Panel now supports grouping (and ungrouping) models in the current daily build, which at least minimally satisfies points 1, 3, and 4 above. The groups can be named as you wish, and changing active/shown/color/etc. for a group changes the corresponding attribute of all the models in the group.
Right now if multiple models are opened from a single data source they are automatically grouped. This comes into play most often when opening NMR ensembles. If anyone has any strong opinion as to whether this is a good default behavior or not, please speak up! --Eric Eric Pettersen UCSF Computer Graphics Lab http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu