Add support for notes on compositions — group nodes visually and write some info about that group

Node based editors sometimes get very messy with lots of nodes, would be great if we have some way to group nodes visually and write some info about that group to make things more easy to understand, like the notes from Quartz Composer.

If you do this please make the notes selectable within marquee selections.

Really annoying in QC when you move a bunch of patches and the notes don’t get moved with them. I often put notes under patches to ‘code block’ as set a of patches with some comments and it would be nice to treat the notes as ‘inline’ with nodes not extraneous object to be moved or copied and pasted separately

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I was wondering if creating a “node group” that actually combined the selected nodes into a single node with maybe a small icon and textual annotation/description bar that indicated that it is a group and also identified what the group is would be even more helpful. In Quartz Composer I think they called a similar feature a “Macro” and saving them to the patch library was a “Virtual Macro”. I know in VUO you can Save Composition to Node Gallery which is great and I’ve used this feature a few times, however unless it’s a node grouping you plan on using repetitively in more than one composition I don’t feel it’s the best way to simplify or clean up your editor canvas and over time could also lead to a rather bloated Node Library as well.

I really like the way the 3D animation software Blender does this… see about the 32sec mark.

Blender Node Groups

I like it because you are able to view the embedded grouped nodes simply by selecting it and “Tabbing” in and out of the group, but you don’t actually leave your main composition. I also think the input and output nodes Blender creates are a fair bit cleaner in appearance than the way we currently use publish input and output ports in VUO. At least I would prefer this method for grouping nodes, the current way VUO does Publish Ports makes sense for regular compositions when IO is being made available to other programs and for the Save Composition to Node Gallery feature.  

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I have a FR for this already:
https://community.vuo.org/t/-/5751#comment-4221

The more I begin to work with Vuo the more I need this desperately. Especially, for notation on comps I want to share on here!

I’d like the notes to be able to sit under nodes like QC notes so you can use to highlight a section.

Notes could even have a port or their own node to receive data like the String Printer patch in QC where you use a tag in the text to insert the input data in your text. That would improve on floating palette output printers in some situations (a lot!).

I personally don’t think this needs to be too “fancy”. A rectangular bounded region into which one can write a decent amount of text documenting what is going on.
Don’t think it needs to be connected to nodes, one just needs to ensure it is selected when associated nodes are moved.

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Chosen to be implemented.

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Fantastic. This will make coding so much better, especially sharing code between Vuo users and for training comps. Vuo in my view is much harder to start using “in anger” than QC because there are ‘invisible concepts’ about code execution and notes will help enormously I think. Especially occasional users like me who tend to forget the little details.

Implemented in Vuo 2.0 beta.

This is SO useful! Thank-you!