Customizable Wire Colors (and Styles?)

[X.]

What makes LabVIEW particularly tedious at times?

Wires.

They wind around structures, cross and extend over sometimes large swath of screen estate (don't bring up the "try to limit the size of your diagram" argument, there are sometimes no other way).

To simplify reading such diagrams (in particular math diagrams: have you ever taken a look at some of the VIs in the math palette?), I suggest introducing an option to "paint" (and possibly change the style) of select wires. As in this mock example:

Pick up a bucket of paint and paint wire segments as you go (or change their style).

Uncheck a box in the toolbar to hide this customization and revert to the bare bone diagram.

[RavensFan]

I had something today where I wanted to highlight one special wire out of others and good have used this.  It seems similar to the concept of creating special wires colors and textures for LVOOP.

One thing I don't like about the idea is that it will open up for everyone to change every wire color to something ridiculous and a VI looking like a circus or a crayon factory exploded.  We've already seen some pretty garish front panels that hurt the eyes when someone finds the pain palette.

The colors that exist now already have special meanings for the datatype on them, so I don't want to lose that meaning.  So in your screenshot, changing the orange wire to heavy blue makes it look like an integer array.  Or the orange wire to heavy green, somewhat like a boolean array.  But something that could lay on a little texture or highlight on a couple significant wires would be nice. However, it is not something I would want to use very often.

I'll give it my kudo, but I doubt we'll see it go anywhere.

[X.]

Fair comments, but:

As I mentioned, this would best be combined with a simple "turn this off" checkbox for those who would not want to see it.

And this is intended to highlight a few critical paths, not colorize the whole spaghetti  bowl.

Finally, as far datatype colors, notice that there is no ambiguity in the example I illustrated (I know that all wires are DBL) and even if there was, that is beside the point of this type of highlight.

[Dmitry]

How about cranking up wire color intensity (to a max allowed value), making it thicker or both ?

[drjdpowell]

How about a temporary highlight of all connected wires when you mouse hover over a subVI or primitive?  Then hovering over the divide nodes in your example in turn would clearly show your sets of wires (though only one at a time).

[X.]

I have no idea how to quote responses but I am referring here to the last two.

@Dmitry: if by intensity you mean saturation, that's not going to cut it for the example I used. All wires are of the same color. Thickness is part of the "style" (used in the title).

@drjdpowell: I do not intend this to be a temporary highlight. I believe what you are suggesting has been proposed in the past (maybe even by me). Moreover, the definition of what is highlighted or not (all branches? not what I am illustrating here. nearest segments? ditto, etc.).

In essence, I am suggesting the equivalent in text-based languages of a color-scheme override, where you can select a piece of code and set its display style to be different than the remainder of the code.

[donkdonk]

Bad idea. Sorry, no kudos.

Wire color gives you an idea of data types being used.

It's a bit like reversed synesthesia.

For me orange and blue wires are immediately perceived as floating point and integer numbers respectively. Green can only be true or false 

From wikipedia "In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored"

[X.]

Dozens of orange wires give you no idea of anything but of a rat's nest.

Of course one can strive to not go beyond a few wires per diagram...

[James@Work]

I'd also have to say "NO" to messing with wire colors; it would really destroy readability.  And, as pointed out by DonkDonk they colors are linked to data types; something that should not change.

For this example, and likely most diagrams, clarity could be easily provided by using wire labels and comments.

[X.]

It admittedly departs from the "whole grey and faded" new NI fad...

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 3 kudos within 3 years after posting will be automatically declined.