Bump-to-connect

General
1

Hi There,

I had this vision of connecting nodes by "bumping" them together, something like this animation:

bump-connect2

The idea is that I drag two nodes together such that their ports overlap. Pause for a moment and they are automagically connected.

This is something that would be helpful for my mindmap in NR but that's another story.

Anybody else think this might be useful?

Cheers!

P.S. this animation doesn't do the feature justice because I go off screen and create the link - so in real life it would be much smoother.

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2

Judging by your animation Bart, it might be a useful tweek to the UI.
But I have quite cramped flows to try and get as much as possible on screen without scrolling.
I don't like the idea of dragging a node into the flow and accidentally wiring it up to the wrong node just by proximity.

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3

that happens to me when I copy&paste and drag a new node over a link between existing nodes - that sometimes the copy & paste is too fast and suddenly an existing link is divided.

I usually Cmd-Z that away - which works because paste and link creation are two separate events in the undo list.

Perhaps an extra "wiggle" to glue the nodes together would be a kind of confirm for the link....

4

Alternatively combined with a key stroke? Could eliminate the wait.

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5

I was looking at the code for doing the link splitting when a node travels over a non-straight link.

As a result, I can definitely say that d3 is a planet of its own! I was over for something like an "on over" event when two ports overlap, no chance of finding that.

So any pointers to how to do this would be great :+1:

6

My two cents is that it could be good but proof would be in how it works in practice

My initial thoughts is that it should only happen if the two connectors are overlapped and then a dotted line (like when we insert a node on top of a wire) appears while your moving around.

7

Yes and when you release the node it becomes solid. The problem there is what is the action to remove the dotted line? With the link and node, you just move the node away and the dotted lines goes away.

In this case the line is being dragged along, there isn't an undo action as simple as moving away.

So that would need to be thought through.

Edit: typo

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