Promote Color Legend Properties Editor

During the ASC quarterly, Cory mentioned that there are frequently questions asked about the color legend editor. Should we promote this icon to the main ParaView screen, just to the right of the Edit Color Map icon? Additionally, lets make it into a View, thus making it easier to find. My vote would be a yes.

@cory.quammen @mwestphal @Kenneth_Moreland @utkarsh.ayachit

That does not feel necessary to me.

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I agree with @mwestphal. Perhaps a better option may be to popup the dialog by double-clicking on the color legend itself in the 3D View.

I am not sure I follow what you mean by this. Do you mean to say make it dockable instead of a popup dialog?

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While I agree with @mwestphal and @utkarsh.ayachit 's points about this particular suggestion, I think @wascott raises an interesting idea/need about how to find help in different sections of ParaView’s UI.

One probably impractical idea to generalize Alan’s idea - you could add search terms to UI elements and have an interaction that would open docs.paraview.org and search for those terms.

Probably not too impractical. Taking it a little further, one can think of a “Q&A” box where people can just “ask” and then they are pointed to a potential solution – akin to a “copilot”! Limiting the “dataset” used to the official documentation would be perfect with option to expand to include high quality sources like ParaView Discourse or StackOverflow. – I digress :melting_face:.

Interesting discussion. I really like the way the discussion is going, although it doesn’t sound easy…

What I mean by View (and wasn’t very clear, was i) is to add the “Color Legend Properties Editor” to the View menu at the top of ParaView, right above “Color Map Editor”. I think this would make it much easier for someone to find.

I would like to move forward with some solution here, even if it isn’t complete. Anyone have objections to me creating a feature request adding the Color Legend Properties to the Menu/View list?

It should be possible to add it to the View menu. To make it consistent with other panels like the Color Map Editor, we might need to make it a dockable panel that can appear independently of the Color Map Editor. That’s probably okay IMO - the color legend properties and color map properties are largely independent.

If you do make a feature request, one thing that I’d ask is for the Edit Color Legend Properties window to not act as a “modal” window. I find it a little annoying that I can’t try interacting with the render view, to see if maybe a slightly different model orientation fits better with the legend, nor can I move the (undocked) Color Map Editor which will sometimes obscure the legend:

^ Can’t move the right pop-up which is blocking the legend that I’m trying to edit. I have to close the legend editor, then move the colormap editor, then re-enter the legend editor.

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OK everyone. I got tired of not having clear direction, so I wrote up what I think makes sense. In my mind the color legend editor is at least as important as some of the other Menu/View’s (Material Editor). I asked that we add an icon next to the Color Map Editor (we have an icon for quartiles, ruler and light kit. This is as important). I asked that it be promoted to be the same as any other editor or control in the Menu/View list. Last, I agree with Greg. It should not be modal. Written up here: https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/issues/22165. Now’s the time to disagree - and make a proposal that solves the “how do we edit the color legend?” problem.