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. 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. Best regards, Rudy On Mon, 7 Jan 2013, Elaine Meng wrote:

Hi Rudy, If by "edit" you mean building or otherwise modifying atomic structures, see the menu entries under Tools... Structure Editing, especially Build Structure. There are also things in Tools...Volume for modifying density maps, and in Multalign Viewer (under Tools... Sequence) for editing sequence alignments.

See "modifying and saving data": <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/savemodel.html>

We have discussed a general undo but it is technically unfeasible, at least in this generation of Chimera. I hope this helps, Elaine ---------- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco

On Jan 6, 2013, at 10:58 AM, Rudy J. Richardson wrote:

...

To whom it may concern:

Although this would be a departure from the current menu structure in Chimera, would it be possible to add a conventional "Edit" to the menu that would be populated with actions appropriate for editing?

In addition, either in a new Edit menu or in the current Actions menu, would it be possible to add a global "Undo" function?

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely yours,

Rudy

Eric, Thanks for the further explanations, and thanks again for all the work of you and the team to make Chimera such a great product. Rudy On Mon, 7 Jan 2013, Eric Pettersen wrote:

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