Separation navigation and orientation for files open in a window

General Discussion Suggestions
1

I understand this might be a feature not everyone will agree with, or want all the time. But it would be nice to be able to enable a feature to separate the navigation/orientation between files open in the same window.

Before completely dismissing the idea, hear me out. There are times I open multiple files in the same Avogadro window that I may be just giving a quick look at, or are not related to one another. During those times, it can be very frustrating to get one molecule exactly as I want it to see something, then move on to the next one only to have it mostly out of frame, or flipped totally wrong. Currently, if this happens you can either 1) live with it, having to reorient each file as needed, or 2) open a new window of Avogadro to unlink the views. I also understand you don’t want this to happen all the time because you may have several files that are related that you want to include in a paper or presentation and having them all oriented the same is ideal.

So I propose a ‘separate navigation between windows’ feature, perhaps a toggle under the navigation tool sub-window. When it is enabled you can click between files and navigate them separately.

Sub-options

If the ‘separate navigation between windows’ toggle was enable then several sub-options would become available, like the following:

  • Global/Individual Application: I would imagine it would be a global feature that would apply to every file open, but perhaps it might be helpful to be able to specify globally or individually. [I could see individually being helpful the times I open a new file/drag a new .out file into the window and the molecule is half out of the frame and I just need to get it back into the frame before orienting them all the same way.]
  • Default View: Until specified in one of the files, this option wouldn’t be selected. But once this option was selected for one file, it would grayed out for all others. Alternatively, in the files sub-window there could be a toggle for the file you want to specify being the default view (only one can be selected). [This might be helpful in conjunction with the next option]
  • Copy Default View: (original suggestion from Geoff) I’d imagine if separating navigation was on an individual basis, and you wanted to sometimes have a default view, then you could copy it from one file to another with this kind of feature. Once a file was selected as the ‘default view’, then this toggle/feature would be available to select for other files.

Thoughts and opinions?

2

Yeah, this discussion came up before - I’m not sure I can find the thread.

There are a few use cases, and I’m not sure there’s one approach that works for everything.

  • opening a bunch of related files and you’d like to retain the camera / zoom / view for all of them (the current default)
  • opening files that aren’t necessarily related and you want a default view for each one (the previous default)

I’m not sure it’s an option for the navigation tool though. The view is actually set by the main window code by default.

Having an option to switch between these approaches seems like a useful answer. Guess we need an options dialog?

3

What do you mean by " default view for each one"? What did it look like? Was the default view not a global thing? Or was it global default based on the first file and you could use it or not for subsequent files?

4

The previous default would have a different view for each file opened. So if you rotated the view for one file, it wouldn’t affect the view in another (or newly opened) file.