Recently used colors?

[olibclarke@…]

Hi, It would be useful to have an automatically generated palette of recently used colors, like one has in illustrator and such.

This would be useful when you adjust a certain color just so, and then later in another session you want to keep the color of for example a a particular protein consistent with a previous figure.

Also, in general, auto-generating palettes of colors that are colorblind-safe and maintain hight contrast would be a useful feature (maybe color bychain already does this? Not sure).

Cheers
Oli

[Tom Goddard]

On macOS the native color chooser used by ChimeraX has about 20 squares at the bottom where you can drag colors to keep them for later use. Not sure if the same is in the Windows or Linux color choosers.

There are lots of unclear user interface details of this suggestion. Where would the history of colors appear? We are using native operating system color choosers which won't allow an app to put their own color history in. Which colors will be saved -- just ones from the color chooser dialog? How would you refer to a history color in a command? A detailed design would be needed for this request to get any attention.

[olibclarke@…]

Hi Tom,
OK, I didn’t realize that. But you can still only, as far as I can see, drag a single color there, selected from the color wheel, which itself globally changes the color of the entire molecule - you can’t grab, for example, the color of an existing chain and save it for later.

(By the way, if I have an existing selection, and I use the color chooser, it reports the color of the current selection, which is great, and an improvement from chimera. But if I then change the color in the color chooser, it changes the color of the entire molecule, rather than just the selection! This does not seem like the desired behavior.)


In a menu, with a thumbnail. Click on the menu item, and either (if there is a selection) alter the color of the selection to that color, or (if not), put a color id, e.g #CA1B6D into the clipboard where it can be used on the command line.

I would save any color that has been explicitly referred to in a command or modified using the color chooser.


By a color id.

Cheers
Oli

[goddard@…]

Thanks for the additional detail.

So how would the color of a chain be saved?  I guess it would be when you use a command “color #CA1B6D /a”.  Your history of colors will be full of common name colors like “blue” if every color used is automatically put into this history — may defeat the intended use where you want to recall specially tweeked colors.

I don’t grasp how you are showing the color chooser for an existing selection — there is no such capability that I know of in ChimeraX.

[olibclarke@…]

Hi Tom,
Yes.

Possibly, though I would suggest only saving unique colors (not saving “blue” twice, for example).


I was mistaken - it was just that the color in the chooser happened to be the same as one of the chains.
 
Nevertheless, when I select a color in the chooser, it changes the color of the entire molecule. This is rarely useful. Would it be possible to change this behavior such that the color change is restricted to the existing selection, if there is one?

Cheers
Oli

[goddard@…]

I guess you are displaying the color chooser by clicking a color button next to a model in the Models panel.  That color button is the color of the whole model.  It seems sensible that it changes the color of the whole model, not what is selected (which might be parts of some other model).  In Chimera there is a menu entry Actions / Color / From Editor that applies to the selection as do all menu entries in the Actions menu.  That is probably how we will do that in ChimeraX.  Maybe more convenient, the toolbar could have a color button that brings up the chooser and applies to just selected items.  Most toolbar buttons currently apply to selected items.

[olibclarke@…]

Correct - I didn’t know there was another way at present.

Fair enough.

That would be great!

Oli

[olibclarke@…]

By the way - I never used the color editor in Chimera because it changes the color of the selected region to black upon launch, with no opportunity to cancel or undo - the color editor in ChimeraX does not seem to do this, which is great.

Oli

[goddard@…]

Yes the Chimera 1 color editor changing the selection to black is a bug — I’m surprised no one complained and no one fixed it.

[olibclarke@…]

Haha I’m kind of shocked that *I* didn’t complain about it at some point… better late than never!

Oli

[Tom Goddard]

I don't see any specific enough suggestion in this request to implement. ChimeraX is using the operating system provided color Chooser dialog which saves us from having to implement a very complex panel. On macOS the user can drag desired colors to a place in the color chooser to save them for later use. I realize that is not always adequate.

We would need a more concrete idea of what could be added to allow reuse of colors. I'm closing this ticket but it can be reopened if a feasible idea to reuse previously used colors is proposed.