[LOGGED] add more custom folders to toolbox?

[Notdoc]

since Mark's great Guru session 11, my toolbox has filled up with weird and wonderful shaders, and i'm finding it hard to remember what they all do. It would be useful to have some additional customisable toolbox folders to expand on the 'Favourites' category, and add my own, like 'Generators', 'Transitions', 'Image Adjust' etc, particularly as not all the 3rd-party shaders have names that describe their function clearly. Perhaps I missed a page in the manual, and it is already possible to add a folder to the toolbox? If not, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would find this useful in a future update sometime..?

[Woland]

@notdoc said:

possible to add a folder to the toolbox?

Currently, this is not possible.

Workarounds:

• You can name your User Actors after specific functions e.g. Color - Cycler 01, Color - Pallet 01 to group them by functions.

If you're having trouble remembering what GLSL Shaders do: 

• Stick each inside a Macro/User Actor with a Comment explaining what it does, name it "GLSL - [SHADER NAME]" then save the Macro/User Actor to your Global Toolbox Folder. This way all your GLSL Shaders will be in your User Actor folder, with explanations, and grouped together because the list is sorted alphabetically and you've added a common prefix to all your shaders, "GLSL -". You can further sort them by naming them with prefixes that will group them even further such as "GLSL Gen - [SHADER NAME]", "GLSL Transition - [SHADER NAME]", "GLSL Image Adj - [SHADER NAME]", etc. 
• Along the same lines as the User Actor/Macro sorting solution above, you can theoretically take the code of any GLSL shader that runs in Isadora, add comment lines to the top reminding yourself what it does, then copy and paste the entire text of the Shader code (with the comments) into a .txt file and place it into the folder where Isadora looks for GLSL Shaders. In the menu, go to Help > Open Plugin Folder > TroikaTronix GLSL Shaders and the folder will open. (Just make sure it's a plain text file [.txt] and not a rich text file [.rtf].) The next time you close Isadora and re-open it, the shader(s) you created as a text file should show up in the GLSL Shader folder with the name you gave it/them (which allows you to sort them into subcategories by giving them prefixes like "Generator -", "Transition -", "Image Adj -", etc.)
• Create an example patch with a Scene for each Shader that demonstrates what it can do and add Comment actors describing the Shader for yourself so that you can remember what they do. You can use this patch as a "swatchbook" of sorts to look through and quickly remember what your Shaders do.

[Notdoc]

thanks for this thoughtful solution! sounds like a good job to do on a rainy afternoon in autumn... :-)

doc