Hello, I was wondering is touchscreen still not really supported? Seems like a dream to have a huge screen and touch for VCV rack.
Thanks, Steve
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Yes, touch, trackpad, graphics tablet touch are all still unsupported.
When first looking at Rack, and looked further into this issue, I found it was because Rack relies on an external dependency for input, and that dependency doesn’t support touch/multitouch. When I looked at the dependency’s issues list, they said they wouldn’t support it because not all platforms support it (in particular: Mac). Despite the fact that there was a tested PR to enable it (for Windows, at least), but they refused to accept it for the xplat uniformity concern.
I heard that Tim Cook was considering touch for future Macs - a departure from Job’s stand that touch isn’t interesting on a laptop - but that has not materialized yet AFAIK. If that ever happens, then perhaps this might see the light of day.
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I love the touchscreen on my 12.9" iPad Pro, but I usually use an Apple Pencil rather than my finger. That iPad is MIDI/USB/BLUETOOTH/WIFI integrated into my studio setup and is an extremely powerful controller surface. Recently I got it working again as a MIDI controller with VCV Rack on my Windows PC.
But of course VCV Rack does not work with iOS (yet?). There is another Rack that works fine with iOS.
Recently I tested a touchscreen on Windows 10. Especially turning a knob on the touchscreen didn’t work as expected. The knob always turned from one ent to the other, it was not possible to set the knob in a position between.
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Per the Rack docs, did you adjust the Lock cursor while dragging setting?
Using either touch or pen with Rack on my otherwise wonderful Wacom tablet is a poor experience. Very disappointing – the Wacom supports 10-point multitouch, which would be awesome in VCV. It would be awesome to use my Surface Book or my wife’s old Surface 3 in tablet mode, but VCV is just not usable this way.
Edit: I’ve adjusted the Wacom tablet settings and getting some slightly better results now. 3-finger drag works fine for changing a knob (didn’t require changes), and adding two-finger “add tap to click” enables dragging knobs and sliders using that gesture. I couldn’t get single tap-drag to work, but that’s not just VCV.
I find this a lot in open source software. I blame it on the prevalence of MacBook laptops in the dev community. If MacBooks had touch screens, I think you’d see much more common touch support. It’s a case of “doesn’t work on my computer” (the opposite of “works on my computer”).
The lack of ability to naturally twist two knobs independently at once is a departure from the mission to emulate a physical modular system. Certainly hurts the performance aspect.
Thanks for your hint! Disabling lock cursor while dragging and setting knob mode to relative rotary helped a lot.
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Any chance theres some wonderful code wizard out there trying to make a mac touch screen helper for v2?
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Its super disappointing. I don’t even need multi touch. But it would be so nice if there was a fix for the tap first and than move a control behaviour. It was one of the main reasons why I bought rack pro. Because I was hoping the vst version would handle it better. Most vst work well even with multitouch. Also there is mi rack for iOS. So it is not impossible to enable touch. Please add this feature. Maybe we all should ask support again for that functionality. Is there a place for suggestions and voting for new features?
I surely would like to have the feature added, (as having it is better than needing it) but it is very low on my list, as I don’t have any touchscreen to use with rack.
And maybe there are not enough users needing it, so that the devs put it high on the priority list, but maybe, when you ask them …
Part of the issue is that Rack depends on GLFW for input, and that library doesn’t support touch, because Macs don’t support touch natively. (Ignoring the fact that touch displays and tablets that work with Macs exist.) So, to just get a start on it, it would mean forking GLFW and applying the existing neglected PRs out there that add support on some platforms that have native touch.
Quite a bit of work, for a minority of users. The core VCV Rack devs may not have ready access to computers with touch, or run an OS that supports it. (common with OSS Linux devs on their 2012 MBPs ;-).
But the more people ask, the more likely it could rise to getting done.
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More likely, but still very unlikely.
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Touch screen mode like on an iPad would be huge and get close to the feeling of using a real rack, I’d love this, but as mentioned it will likely never happen sadly.
I hate touchscreens, my mouse is 10000000000 times more precise