Hi all,
as I've learned in the past few days, investigating or fixing other things while waiting for tedious compiles to finish can be quite productive. :) [1]
In revision #16617 I added two spin buttons to the toolbar of the node tool which allow exact editing of node coordinates (this was long overdue - see bugs #170116 and #172113). Please test and report any irregularities. ;-)
One thing to note is that originally I had planned to clear the entry fields when two or more nodes are selected. But I didn't know how to do this (is it possible at all?), so I decided to go for a quick hack and display the coordinates of the center of the bounding box instead. This turned out to be quite nice because it allows one to quickly align several nodes in the following way: Select them, press Alt+x (which switches focus to the coordinate entry fields) and press enter. Since the first entry field already shows a new X coordinate (lying in the middle between the extremal nodes), this aligns all the nodes vertically to this coordinate.
Although at first it was a kind of stopgap solution I now really like the concept. Unfortunately, this "feature" is not really usable by keyboard alone yet because if you want to align the Y coordinates, you need to press Alt+x and then Tab in order to get to the second entry. But since the first one (for the X coordinates) already shows a new value, pressing tab sets the X coordinates to this value, no matter if this is desired or not.
Suggestions for possible solutions are welcome. To summarize, the options I can think of are:
- clear the entries if more than one node is selected, or - somehow prevent the nodes' coordinates from being changed while tabbing between the entries
both of which I don't know how to do. :-/
Thanks for any hints and suggestions, Max
P.S.: I'm going to add this to the Release Notes tomorrow. I'm just too tired right now to find good phrasings in English. ;)
[1] Aside: Especially when using a distributed version control system like git so that you can work on several things at once. It's such a pleasure compared to svn! I can only heartily recommend people to use it (or rather git-svn in our case because we need to be able to commit to the repository, of course).