surface hide/show wonky

[pett]

"surface show" seems busted. Ergo:

open 3fx2
surface

shows entire surface -- good

select helix
surface hide sel

hides entire surface -- bad

surface show sel

shows entire surface -- bad

surface hide sel&@*

hides just the helix surface patches -- good, I guess

surface hide

hides the surface

surface show sel&@*

shows whole surface -- bad

surface hide sel&@*

hides just the helix surface patches

surface hide

hides the surface

surface show sel&@*

shows whole surface -- bad

surface hide

hides the surface

surface show helix

shows entire surface(!) -- bad

[Tom Goddard]

Fixed.

Would be useful if the documentation clarified that "surface show" and "surface hide" show and hide patches associate with the atoms. I wasn't actually sure whether they were supposed to instead show/hide whole surfaces and the documentation wasn't clear on that. So for instance "surface hide #1" will still show surfaces #1 as shown in model panel even though no surface will be visible because all atom patches are hidden. To hide the model the person should use "hide #1 surface".

It is a bit trickier than that. If a molecular surface does not have atom associations for instance "surface #1 resolution 10" makes a surface whose points are not associated with atoms then the "surface show" and "surface hide" commands do hide whole surface models. For instance "surface hide helix" would hide the whole surface if some the atoms used to create it are in helices.

[Elaine Meng]

The fourth sentence in the surface manpage is "Atomic patches in an SES can be controlled (hidden, shown, etc.) independently by specifying the corresponding atoms…” and there are two separate usage lines for specifying atoms as opposed to the whole surface models.  Your point about requiring atom-associated surfaces is why this is described only in the bullet point for SES and not for Gaussian surfaces.