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Terminal Organization - Name Prefix (Minimal Code QoL Change)

Mike B shared this feedback 23 months ago
Not Enough Votes

The Problem

When you have several ships docked together or to a base, it can get quite difficult to identify which components belong to which ship when you're in the control panel ("which of the 5 ships, or the station, does this 'battery' belong to?").

Different colors in the terminal tell you that blocks belong to different grids, but they don't tell you which grids.


Challenges

There are a few ways this could be addressed (at least a few have already been suggested on these forums), but I understand that overhauling the terminal UI is probably not a small task and you're probably busy with other, more interesting features.

Determining and displaying which grid a block belongs to may also be complicated by grids splitting or merging, such as with merge blocks.


Proposed Solution

A solution that's already available to players is to rename the blocks, often by adding the name or some sort of identifier for the ship before the name of the part. This absolutely works, it's just incredibly tedious to rename each block individually - the larger the ship, the worse it is.

My proposed solution is to add an option to add/remove a prefix to a group of blocks all at once.


So, in the terminal I select multiple blocks (just like if I were going to put them in a group). Below the group option, there's now a "set prefix" section (a text field to put in the desired prefix, along with 'set' and 'remove' buttons).

I enter my desired prefix, say "Ship 1" and click set - all of the selected blocks are renamed to "[Ship 1] <original name>" (e.g. "[Ship 1] Battery").

If I clicked remove (or 'set' with an empty prefix), it would delete the "[Ship 1]" prefix. The code for finding the current prefix could just be "the first thing in the name that's enclosed in square brackets", probably a regex something like: ^\[([^]])\]


(I'm just using square brackets as an example, it could be any other delimiter if those would cause any issues.)


I believe this would solve the problem and provide maximum flexibility for minimal effort, which is always my favorite kind of fix!


Thank you for reading!

Replies (3)

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1

I think folder-like structures may be more useful, though harder to implement. but this would help with organizing multiple connected grids!

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1

what you are talking about is really similar to the mod Easy Block Renaming from Lukas

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2

It would make more sense to add a prefix variable to the grid info panel, next to the grid name and a checkbox to auto-apply prefixes to (newly added) blocks or a button to apply prefixes to all blocks of a ship.

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