Save independent rotation mouse mode in sessions

[hassan@…]

From: "Hassan, Sergio \(NIH/NIAID\) \[E\] via ChimeraX-users" <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu>
Subject: [chimerax-users] suggestion
Date: November 22, 2022 at 9:02:01 AM PST
To: "chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu" <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu>
Reply-To: "Hassan, Sergio \(NIH/NIAID\) \[E\]"

Hello, 
I recently requested via Phil Cruz the 'tile' command, which I learned it was recently introduced. I have been using it successfully. However, there are two points I would like to bring to your attention (I asked Phil to ask you, but not sure he reached out)

1) when a session is saved as .cxs and I quit the program, after opening it again, the most important feature of the 'tile' command (rotations around each own axis) is lost. The tile distribution is still there, but now the entire thing rotates around a common axis. I need to apply 'tile' again to make it work, but this resets all the modifications I made in the saved session (these modifications include those in point 2 below).

2) any chance to add an argument to the 'tile' command so that the default spatial distribution, which assigns a 'distance' between near neighbors, can be adjusted with, say, 'zoom in" or "zoom out" or crowd in/out? I noticed the default puts each panel too far away from its neighbors for my taste, so I need to "move" them to make them look closer to one another.

thanks
s
_____________________________________
Sergio A. Hassan
https://bioinformatics.niaid.nih.gov/cmm/
BCBB/NIAID/NIH/DHHS

[Tom Goddard]

Not sure if we want to save mouse modes in sessions. But in the meanwhile here is how to get the independent rotation mode back.

To make ChimeraX rotate each displayed model about its own center you use the "rotate independent" mouse mode. The tile command enables that mode. You can enable it after loading a session with command

mouse left "rotate independent"

Loading a session file does not restore the mouse modes to what they were when you saved the session. Maybe it should. In this case it would be helpful but if you were using some other special purpose mouse mode I suspect you usually don't want the session file to remember that.

We'll add to the tile command documentation the above command which reenables the independent center of rotation.

[Elaine Meng]

Added to the "tile" documentation:

If independent rotation gets turned off (e.g., when tiled models are restored from a session), it can be reactivated with command:

mousemode left "rotate independent"