need method to reset view to default state

[Greg Couch]

When closing a session, all of the tools are reset to the default state. But the viewing parameters are not reset. Naively replacing session.main_view with a new View object causes errors. If that could be made to work, great. Otherwise, it would be good to have a view.reset() or view.set_default_parameters().

[goddard@…]

Could easily add a View set_default_parameters() method.

I think we need to figure out what is the most useful behavior for close session.  Do I really want closing a session to change the background color from white to black if I had changed it to white?  Do I want it to switch camera mode from stereo to mono (that would be highly annoying when working with stereo display).  Maybe the View would not switch to the default camera mode (mono), instead the camera mode itself would reset — just as bad if the stereo camera mode switches to default stereo parameters.  What about window size — I don’t think closing the session should revert to a default graphics window size.  How about redraw frame rate — would close session change that back from a value I set?

[Greg Couch]

"close session" should get back to the state that ChimeraX started out in. If ChimeraX started in stereo, it should stay in stereo. The alternative is just "close" that only closes the models. The only exception I might make would be for the window size.

Once there are preferences, then the behavior will be better since it will reset to the user's preferences and not our defaults.

[goddard@…]

I don’t think close session should take me out of stereo mode even though ChimeraX does not start in stereo mode.  And I think there other settings that should not be reset across settings.

[Conrad Huang]

I think parameters have to be considered individually.  The ones you 
mention (not wanting to reset) typically have something to do with the 
particular environment the user is in.  For example, you do not want to 
reset stereo parameters because they are tuned for the room/projector 
you are using.  You may not want to resize your window because you are 
on a much bigger/smaller monitor than usual.  In fact, almost all of the 
viewing parameters probably fall in this category.

On the other hand, parameters like default molecule styling or label 
formatting should probably revert to the same state as just starting 
ChimeraX from scratch.  In my opinion, those tend to me more data 
dependent, and closing a session gets rid of the data you were looking 
at, so keeping parameters applying to non-existent data does not seem 
useful (i.e., the using default values for those parameters are more 
likely to be applicable for the next data set than the values tuned for 
the closed data set).

On 8/8/2017 12:46 PM, Tom Goddard wrote:

[Tom Goddard]

No specific use case for resetting viewing parameters on close has been given. As Conrad mentioned, many of the parameters should probably not be reset.

No parameters that need to be reset have been specified.

I'm closing this ticket as there is nothing specific enough to act on. If some parameters need to be reset the ticket can be reopened listing exactly which parameters.