Pattern Link

So Renoise has this great function that allows you to join selected patterns together to make big, long ones. This is convenient for automation or if you simply decide that you want to merge patterns. However, I have one problem with it, and that is that it completely destroys the usefulness of the Pattern Highlights in the song settings. For instance, if I have set ‘Highlight every xx blocks’ to, say, 4, and I join 1 or more patterns
together, then from that point on the highlight-blocks are ‘out-of-sync’.

A solution I thought up that might help change this is a pattern Link function instead of (as well as) Join. This would mean that while editing the notes or automation, the patterns will (temporarily?) stick together to form one edit area. But as soon as the link is broken, the patterns break up and go back to being 2, 4 or whatever happy unique little patterns they were before, with their old lengths.
By doing this, this process would chop up any drawn automations into smaller pieces.

I hope I have explained myself clearly. If not, I will gladly add some more details and probably fabricate some screenshots.

Being able to properly split patterns would be a manual solution for this as well:

Pattern Split