Share a hint!

TD is full of hidden features, especially small interface things you get to know by accident after using it a while. This happens to me quite often although I’m using TD a lot. Why not share a litte trick you think is like some hidden feature?

Here are mine:
From a really old TD tut I learned yesterday that if you select a TOP, you can press ‘a’ to activate its viewer, right. But stay on it with your cursor and press ‘a’ agin and you see it’s alpha channel! Or press ‘r’, ‘g’, or ‘b’!

Some others that are kind of hard to see for beginners I think:
press ‘c’ to color operators.
‘t’ for a list of all ops in your network.
‘g’ for grouping features.

Control + C = copy
Control + V = paste
Control + Shift + V = paste at mouse

‘O’ while mouse over network = visual operator overview

Right click menu → Reset Node Size (for all those times you’ve resized nodes to see whats inside, but then you want them back to normal so you can align them)

F2 = Performance monitor
F3 = Search Dialog

just a few shortcuts I use regularly.

try ‘h’ to ‘home’ a viewer and on the workspace to see the whole thing at any time.

Type opfiles into your textport in t-script mode when you’re gonna copy files to another computer and it’ll list all the files currently used in your project, if any have C:/ get them changed to relative paths in your folder to avoid missing files when you’re on-site…a classic one I fall into.

Oh. that’s a good one. Keep 'em coming! :slight_smile:

Tab to bring up the Op Create Dialog, then Ctrl-click to lay down multiple OPs, or Shift-Click to wire multiple OPs together.

What I wish there was: a keyboard shortcut for each sub-dialog in the tab menu (COMP, TOP, CHOP, SOP, MAT, DAT) So that you could use only the keyboard to quickly place any OP you can think of. :nerd:

+1 for the op create keyboard shortcut for category change… would be really helpful!

The link pane feature is something I have managed to ignore until today:
You can have multiple panes that will always be on the same layer of your network or, if you choose so, one is always inside whatever component is selected in the other pane. Seems handy!
(“Link pane” is a little button that looks like some bin, in the pane bar.
derivative.ca/wiki088/index. … e=Pane_Bar)

Also might be a good tip for beginners: even for simple python stuff go to your favorite editor right away. I’m using sublime text just a couple of weeks now and enjoying python stuff a LOT more.

Sublime is the best. Helps so much when you’re sifting through long scripts.

Cant respond without a tip…

When using the run() Python function you have some extremely useful arguments you can pass to it.

Example: op(‘run_this’).run(var1, var2, var3, delayFrames=5*me.time.rate, group=‘group name’)

To break that down, you can send variables from one script to another, they’re the first set of arguments you pass. When you start your new script, you can grab them using this:

var1 = args[0]
var2 = args[1]
var3 = args[2]
etc

0 being the first variable you passed in, 1 the second, 2 the third, etc.

Then you can delay the next script using delayFrames. I usually use value*me.time.rate, which means that value is always seconds, in the example, that would be 5 seconds.

Then you can also assign running scripts to a group as your last argument. This is helpful if you’ve got a ton of delayed scripts running, and sometimes you need to stop a certain group because of an error or something. You can use following script for that:

for i in runs:
if i.group == ‘group name’:
i.kill()

If you got a team of people, or just working on a larger project, you can save a component as a .tox file (right click on component, you know the drill).

Then you can import it in the other project, it will import itself as container. When you click on the container, go to common tab, you can drag the .tox file you just imported from explorer to the “External .tox” field. So when your friend does some changes, you can just reload it by clicking the re-init button.

And then all the changes are loaded in the container again, without you needing to open other projects. :stuck_out_tongue:

Really helpful when someone is working just on some modules, and you don’t wanna keep re-importing stuff.

Best,
Pavel

Thanks for adding this! I always thought the concept of abstraction is a little bit hard to find in TD.

It is maybe even a bit overcomplicated compared to eg. max/MSP

select multiple nodes (right-click drag) (or shift select)

Then right click on the canvas and choose layout options. Nice for us OCD folks :wink:

Docking is an underused feature, I think. I like to use me.dock.run() and then just hide the DAT execute.

In a start method I might also put

me.dock.par.resetpulse.pulse()

And dock the DAT execute to a speed chop or whatever.
screengrab1.tiff (209 KB)

if you press “c” a color menu pops up so you can color all your nodes.

[size=85]I remember I only found after I had been working in Touch for over a year so I thought it would be worthy to post here and revive this thread a bit more :wink:[/size]