Hi Cam, Thanks for your thoughts. I see where you're coming from, but it may be more complicated than it seems at first: Unlike the "Right Mouse" modes, some of these lighting settings represented by icons are composites of multiple settings, many of which can have different numerical values (not simply on/off), and that may be changed independently of one another (e.g. by individual options in the "lighting" command). So even though you could click "soft" lighting, you might later modify some subset of its settings like the number of shadowing sources, or apply another setting on top of it. A couple of these icons like for shadows and silhouettes are essentially on/off toggles, but we figured you could tell from the display whether they were on or not. The coloring and display-style icons do not represent global states, they are actions that apply to whatever is selected at the time. So you might have used them on some models/parts of models and not on others, i.e. they're not mutually exclusive. I hope this makes sense, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Chimera(X) team Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco

On Jun 11, 2024, at 7:55 PM, Cam McMenamie via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Hello!

I'm just suggesting a UI feature that I think would be very helpful. Currently, there are several menu items that do not show any feedback if they are "selected" or not, for example, in the screenshot below (hard to tell which options have been selected / toggled).

This is especially the case for mutually exclusive selections such as in the 'coloring' section in the "molecule display" tab.

<image.png>

Thanks in advance, Cam