Groups and Components are essential to SU. But it is hard to know when you are editing a Group rather than a Component. Having to right click to find out which it is is a pain. And I find I often edit a Component thinking it is a Group or Unique Component only to find I have inadvertently edited some other part of the drawing I didn’t want to. How annoying is that?
I would like to see a visual method of distinguishing Groups and Components when you are in edit mode. Perhaps the background changes colour (blue for a group, red for a Component, say) or there’s a different border.
It would be nice to be able to tell which is which by a color difference. At least if the bounding box was colored. Of course It can easily be determined if Outliner is open but it would be better if you could tell by looking directly at the entity.
The SCF plugin sounds useful. I downloaded it but it just seems to disappear into the system. I think that is may be what happens when an extension is not compatible with the latest version of SU. Extensions not keeping up with SU updates is their Achilles heel.
Yeah. I know what you mean about the clutter. I like having some of the windows available all the time but dislike them on my drawing space so I keep the drawing window a bit narrower than the screen and put the windows off to the right side. I used to do that on both Mac and PC. Now on the PC, there is the tray that mimics the way I’ve always set it up. I wish they’d do it on Mac, too. At least you can stack the windows and scroll them up when you don’t want to look at them.
Another benefit to using Outliner is you can easily see the structure of nested components/groups and you can directly open a component/group that is deeply nest without having to click through all the upper levels.
I installed it using the SCF Plugin store and it showed up in the Edit menu. Check in Preferences>Extensions and see if there’s a tick mark for EditFlag. If not, add it.
FYI, I am/was the programmer for the EditFlag extension. (I haven’t looked at the code in quite awhile.)
This would change the user’s current style (which I don’t normally like to do.) I never know if an AutoSave occurs in the middle of the edit. (Would need to test to be sure the style change does not propagate to the file, ie, when the style is not updated. But this may cause confusing popups from SketchUp prompting the user to save the current style changes.)
Then there is the issue that the background color could be anything. (I run a space theme with a black background.) Also, I’d never know what color might clash with face materials.
A quick look at the RenderingOptions and I do not see the “dotted edit box line color” as one of the keys.
I like the idea of changing that dotted edit box color, rather than the whole background.
Another possibility is temporarily changing the highlight color (leave it blue for components,) make it violet for group. This would only manifest for single item selections.