Pinned channels in pattern editor

[Nahkranoth]

Yesterday I thought that it would be good if there will be such an ability to pin some channels to see them no matter if the view scrolled out somewhere far away. As for me when I don't see the main channels (bass|drum) it's kinda hard when you've got more channels that can fit on the screen.

[LPChip]

You mean, like how that was possible in Impulse Tracker?

[Nahkranoth]

Erm, I don't know how it was before I started tracking in 2005 and there was MPT already :oops:
Like, pinned channels appear to the left, and always stay there.

[Saga Musix]

As you speak about bass and drum channels, do you need them for orientation? Then you may enable "highlight every x rows", if you haven't done so already.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

I think that what Nahkranoth is talking about is something akin to the functionality in Excel, Calc and Gnumeric called 'Freeze Panes'.

Pics always help.


Nine cells, displayed normally. If I scroll, they all move.


The same nine cells, but with a split between A-B and 1-2. If I scroll now, the cells in column A and the cells in row 1 don't move, but the rest of the cells do. In other words, column A and row 1 are always visible. (If you're a web developer, just think position:fixed and you'll get it.)

As far as I can tell, what Nahkranoth means is that you could make channels 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 always stay in view, whilst the others scroll around horizontally. I think that it would have to be all channels from 1 to x, because having fixed channels in the middle of the lot wouldn't really work, IMO. But that's not a huge problem given the channel manager.

And for those who notice that the headers aren't anti-aliased, and the cell font isn't subpixel hinted, and recall my desire for nice antialiasing, I should point out that the problem is OpenOffice.org's use of a statically linked Freetype library, which means that my Freetype settings (used in the rest of my Linux box) aren't applied.

[Nahkranoth]

Yes! Exactly! Haven't thought of Excel though, it is a nice example, but not that complex, I think :gjob:  :welldone:

As you speak about bass and drum channels, do you need them for orientation? Then you may enable "highlight every x rows", if you haven't done so already.

Yes, for orientation indeed, my English was somewhere else when I tried to explain the feature

[LPChip]

The Impulse Tracker freeze option is a bit more suffisticated though.

You can set any channel to freeze and it appears on the left screen with a seperator in between to see where the other channels are.

The biggest difference between IT's functionality and Excell's Freeze panes functionality is that in IT you can select any channel. They don't have to be next to eachother so you could have a view like this:

Chan2, Chan5, Chan8|Chan1, Chan2, Chan3,Chan4

[Nahkranoth]

That's the right example, LPChip! Just as I thought!

[Really Weird Person]

That would be a nice thing to see indeed. See, what did I tell you about Excel? :lol: Actually, I discovered that data can be transferred from Modplug Tracker to Excel and back. I thougt that was interesting.

Although, it is interesting how, when you freeze both a colum and a row (unless that is not what I am looking at in the second image, that could simply be a border and a hidden column, or an image that saved poorly.), column B and row 2 are hidden.

Just a note for future reference, when referring to cell addresses, the subscript is not necessary. That is great for chemistry though, such as H2O (where the 2 is subscripted) for water (or even simply H2 for hydrogen) (where the 2 is once again subscripted).

[g]

The biggest difference between IT's functionality and Excell's Freeze panes functionality is that in IT you can select any channel.

Considering how easy it is to move a column in Excel, that's kind of a non-issue... Anyway, good feature suggestion!

[Sam_Zen]

Although I don't use channel names, I think this would benefit a good survey.

[Saga Musix]

I fail to see how this is in anway connected to channel names. :?

[Really Weird Person]

I am uncertain of the connection myself.

[g]

Another solution is to buy a wider screen.  :wink:

[Waxhead]

I just feel like this again calls for the group channel feature I suggested a few years ago

http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=888.0