Cable Colour Key module

if you click on the source (or dest) of the stacked cables where the cable is you want to change colo(u)r on, that cable will move to the top of the stacked cable. Only way I have found thus far

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Or the other way around (what I prefer) :upside_down_face:

With stoermelder STROKE you can easily rotate the cable ordering on an output.

STROKE1

Before there was Nick’s amazing module to handle cable colors, I had found a solution using stoermelder STROKE, hovering the mouse pointer over a cable connector and pressing a key on the PC keyboard. The downside is that this keystroke is constantly evaluated globally and occasionally conflicts with other inputs. I would therefore advise against implementing it that way.

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A couple of days ago I emailed in the final versions of Cable Colour Key 2.0.0 to be included in the library. I’m not sure how long it’ll take before it is added, but hopefully it’ll be in the library soon. Thanks for all the help testing this.

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You’re welcome! Everyone is looking forward to the appearance in the library.

Your work is highly appreciated! :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

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Thank you! Cable Colour Key is “Fundamental” from now on!

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I already routinely use Cable Colour Key - love it.

Could a mode be added to Cable Colour Key that would cause the module to change the color of all cables in the patch that match the original color of the selected cable? I know I would use that feature.

This idea was spurred by this post: I'm looking for a module to......... - #6 by ScreenSlave

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this, or how you would want this to work.

Big caveat - I am assuming each patched cable in a patch has its own internal color spec that can be accessed. If I totally misunderstand how things work, then maybe this request is moot.

I’ll list a couple use cases, and maybe it will make sense.

  1. I’ve got V1 patch that I am updating to V2. The cables in the original V1 patch were already color coded more or less the way I want. But I need (or want) to make some changes, maybe add or replace some modules, and that requires new cables. The colors I’ve defined for V2 don’t quite match the colors from the old patch. So when I patch a new green cable, it looks different than the others. I would like to be able to update all the “V1” green cables to use the new V2 flavor of green. Currently I would need to update each cable individually. I would like to be able to put the CCK into some new mode (change all like colors), and then I only need to select one of the old green cables, hit my assigned CCK green key, and then CCK queries the selected cable to get its current color, and then searches the patch for all like colored cables and changes them all to the new desired hue.

  2. I have an existing patch that currently uses random color, and I would like to apply a color coding scheme. Sure I need to change the color of each one individually, but with a large patch it may not be easy to keep track of which cables have already been properly assigned. It would be helpful if I could easily and quickly change all cables to one color that I don’t plan on using. Then I can easily recognize which cables still need the correct color assigned. It would be great if there was a function to change all cables at once (maybe that could be yet another CCK mode). But the proposed mode would be almost as effective. If my existing patch only uses red, yellow, green, blue, then with the new mode it would only take 4 actions to change all cables to a temporary pink. Then I can begin the process of assigning the desired color to each cable individually. If I still see pink, I know I still have some work to do. If it is not pink, then I know I can ignore the cable because I have already assigned the correct color.

It might be best to add this as an option in the context menu. I can see that it would be useful. I’m thinking that this might be easiest to add as follows:

  • In Cable Colour Key’s main context menu, have a submenu titled “Replace”.
  • In the Replace submenu, list all of the colours found in cables in the patch, each with a submenu.
  • In the submenu of these found patch colours, have a list of the cable colours used by Cable Colour Key. Selecting one of these will replace all patch cables of the colour in the parent menu, with the colour selected.

Thanks for considering this. That could certainly work. I’m surprised that would be easier to develop, and I’m a little worried the context menu could become a bit unwieldy if there are a lot of colours.

I thought keeping the existing work flow would maintain the spirit of the module, and would be easy to develop. Just a single context menu option to be enabled or disabled. Then when a change color action is initiated via the current mechanism, the code would simply branch depending on which mode was active.

  • blindly change the selected cable to the new colour (current behavior)
  • or query the colour of the selected cable, find all matching cables, and change them all to the new colour.

But I’d be very happy with whatever avenue you take. Thanks.

I think that your method is probably easier, and cleaner, but I think that it would be nice to be more obvious. I think I’m just trying to stop users from doing this accidentally. The normal expected behaviour is to change any currently dragged cable by pushing a keyboard key. Modifying this might be confusing.

Also, a comment by another user got me thinking about how the current way this module works isn’t particularly accessible for all (i.e. you need to be able to do two things at once - push a keyboard button and hold a cable with the pointer), so this would get around this issue. I’m also probably going to add an option to have the global hotkeys work when a cable isn’t selected, to get around this issue.

This is what I’m thinking, so far. I’ve separated the colours so that the ones that don’t match the current Cable Colour Key palette are listed at the bottom. Feel free to chime in if anyone else has thoughts on this.

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Great resolution ! Hope to see it soon working here?

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To cover @DaveVenom’s scenario #2, you could add an “All” entry that would set all the cables in the patch to a specific color.

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Done. I’ve just finished adding all of this. Fortunately I’m away from home/work at the moment, with time to spare while I wait for some other life things, so this should all be in version 2.0.1 once it has been tested.

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I just discovered this module, you just made my life brighter forever, I was sick of the old colors. I knew there was a way to change it thru some .ini file but never did. Heartfelt kudos !

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Hello Nick, for some reason I can’t load a preset anymore. I tried to delete every file related to Cable Colour in the VCV folder to see if that could work, I re-installed it from the library, it still doesn’t load a preset. Any idea ?

Everything else works flawlessly.

Hi I just found out by reading this post that you can have up to 16 colours. It’s really a very useful module. Not very constructive comment, but I wanted to say it. Thank you

And by the way, would you know if there is a way to manage the opacity of the cables individually? Just keeping some of the cables opaque could be very useful. Or having some colours transparent and some not ?

If you go into the right-click context menu, then to the Settings submenu, make sure that the “Load/save colours to/from patches/presets”, and/or " Load/save keys to/from patches/presets" are enabled. The behaviour of this changed in the latest version, where key mappings are now saved globally.

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I’m not sure whether or not this is possible, but I could have a look to see if opacity can be set, and remain set, for the cable colours.