Something which would be nice to have for tidier layouts would be an ability to resize group boxes, possibly by a grab and stretch mode on edges or corners. This could be selected by e.g. shift-clicking the box perimeter, and using a different cursor to indicate resize mode is active.
Currently the boxes auto-adjust to the contents, but this leads to slightly annoying layouts like this :
It's a personal preference I suppose. I'm not too bothered and it's just something I decided to ask about while I was editing a couple of things. Think of it as a WIBNI* feature, which can be very low priority. If I ever** get time to do a bit of work on Node-RED, it's something I might look into
edit : I suppose it's from my years of coding, making sure everything is nicely lined up with proper indenting...
* "wouldn't it be nice if..."
** pretty unlikely at the moment
I'm with you on that, it certainly triggers my OCD. But then because I was already lining up left and right columns of nodes it isn't too horrendous most of the time.
But you are right, sometimes something like a change of name in a node will throw things out and you have to go and re-align everything!
Maybe a better option still would be an alignment menu option. So select multiple nodes and have everything aligned to the first selected node. Top, bottom, left, right alignment. Now that would be REALLY nice
Ah, even better! I've used a few different code formatting/beautifying/refactoring tools over the years, so a configurable visual programming reformatter would be a nice addition. I think it would be a nightmare to develop though, and not something I think I'd like to wrap what's left of my brain around
Not actually sure it would be that hard. But then I don't know D3 really so I may well be way off. Be a fun project probably for someone who wanted to get into layout control for Node-RED.
but it would be nice to be able to resize the longer boxes and keep my output nodes nicely aligned at the same time.
