FuX and I were chatting about how it can sometimes be difficult to quickly see exactly which track you’re currently working in, ie. where the cursor currently is. In certain themes (some of my own, ironically) this can be especially difficult.
If you glance away from the screen for a moment, then look back, sometimes it can be difficult for your eye to track down these small visual cues. Your eyes have to scan over the tracks for a few moments until you see what’s what.
So I propose to add an extra customisable field in the theme/colour settings which defines the background colour of the track which is currently active. This makes it many, many times easier to immediately see which track is active.
Now I agree that this is a small visual thing which can be improved simply by altering the theme’s colour settings, but I also think that adding this extra option could just improve workflow that little bit extra… and every little bit counts! It certainly wouldn’t hurt Renoise to make these visual clues a bit more obvious to the user, making the application a little friendlier to use overall.
I actually want to go as far as being able to view a single track by its own. Like i.e. doubleclicking on it and it’s the only one in the patterneditor window. Totally focusing on that track.
Yeah. Well the beauty of my suggestion is that it’s customisable by the user. If you want it to be subtle then it’s no problem. If you want it to be bright pink then that’s up to you also
Once again, it would simply be a matter of adjusting your theme colours until it looks the way you want. You want everything to look the same? No problem.
Yeah, actually dblue has a point… I can imagine some people would want it like it is now or whatever colors… and it’s just adding an extra option for the color settings.
gmm04e’s idea is a bit more radical. no big deal to me, either way, tho.
As long as we do not have this special kind of highlight, you can easily fix this by using a darker color for “Pattern_CenterBar_Back”. This will make the pattern cursor more prominent.
If you want to change this, send the updated theme files to me please, then I will include them in the next release…
dblue’s idea of an outline is best. Highlighting would not be enough for me. An outline is much more apparent to the eye (in a good way) and could be changed to a really harsh colour like bright pink without causing any offence or disruption to existing themes.
Much better for playing live if that is your thing too.
Even better would be highlights AND an outline.
And yeah, this would have to have the same effect in the mixer too.
Haha. If I cant even read a few posts on a message board, how am I supposed to be able to see what I am doing in a tracker… So this needs to be implemented!
So yeah…
Highlight AND outline
+1
To take the idea even further, it would be excellent to put all non-focus tracks LITERALLY out of focus a bit, sort of like a photoshop blur has been applied to all non-focus tracks. This would mean you can still see the data but it would be slightly out of focus and make the focus track stand out really well…
This might be a bit processor heavy though, I imagine (although I am no coder so it might be alright:))
highlighting the track you’re working on with color outline is fine with me.
I’d rather have a more pronounced outline or focus in the trackscopes as to what is it right now aswell, since you always have all the trackscopes in 1 view. The way track-descriptions in the scopes highlight when you select the track could be much ‘bolder’ , especially since the master track scope is always highlighted with the same color…
If you like that, then fine… But I think we need more nifty visualisation options… Option being the key word!
Oh sorry, I get it now! I think the mixer is good at highlighting, but could be more obvious.
I think we should make everything as obvious as possible (whilst still retaining the original beauty of the interface of course) so it is mega easy to navigate. In its current state it is not first class when it comes to finding what you are looking at
, it’s just a beauty of trackers to see all (almost) tracks at once.