Scott, I think I am flattered that you have mistaken laziness for philosophy. I think I will stick with that in the future. Whenever there is a feature that seems to be absent from my software, then all users should assume there is a deep philosophical reason for its absence. I am such a very deep fellow, after all! Silliness aside, I am fully aware that the various lists in Artemis need the ability to be reordered. It just hasn't been implemented in any serious way. There really isn't a compelling reason other than that no one had yet complained about it. I had, in fact, never considered resorting path lists in the way you suggest. That's an interesting idea. I'll bump all this up on the to-do list. It certainly won't be in the next release, but hopefully the one after. B On 07/03/2013 10:38 AM, Scott Calvin wrote:
Hi Bruce,
I and my group have finally started using Demeter Artemis, and in general it's wonderful. But there's one aspect of the user interface philosophy that I'm either not getting or finding clunky.
In Horae, it was sometimes possible to rearrange the order of lists. For example, the list of groups in Athena could be rearranged by moving groups up and down, while the list of parameters in the GDS screen could be rearranged by using the "move" option.
I'm not really finding that functionality in Demeter. The GDS screen does allow copying, but that requires a multiple-step process for a move. And I don't see a way to rearrange the order of groups in Athena at all. In addition, there's a new place where this kind of functionality would be helpful but appears to be lacking: the path list in the Data window. Since that list is now populated by drag-and-drop, it can end up in some pretty oddball orders.
Am I just not grokking some UI feature that lets the user rearrange the order of lists? Dragging, for instance, doesn't seem to work. Or are there other features I should be using that make the order of those lists relatively unimportant? Or is ordering lists something that will appear in future versions, but it just hasn't been implemented yet?
If the latter, then I also have a further feature suggestion, although it's not high priority. It would be quite useful if the path list in the Data window could be sorted in various ways, perhaps even with primary and secondary criteria. So, for example, sort by feff calculation, and then by importance. Or by number of legs, and then by Reff. While the marks menu lets us quickly select paths in a number of nifty ways, getting them in order of Reff or importance would be quite effective at cleaning up messy lists.
-- Bruce Ravel ------------------------------------ bravel@bnl.gov National Institute of Standards and Technology Synchrotron Methods Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2 Building 535A Upton NY, 11973 Homepage: http://xafs.org/BruceRavel Software: https://github.com/bruceravel