@whale-av Thanks! While searching for [coords( documentation I stumbled across [goprect( buried in the dynamic patching help. It looks like it's relatively new and doesn't set the dirty flag.

And unless there's a difference in how canvases are messaged, then it seems like the answer to my original question is that the [namecanvas] way let's you send to any accessible named canvas in the patch, whereas pdcontrol is just for the containing canvas and saves you the trouble of having to name it. Other than that they seem equivalent.

I'm sending a [donecanvasdialog....( message to a canvas to resize its GOP. It appears that I can either use [namecanvas] to create a receive on a particular canvas, or I can use the [sendcanvas...( message with [pdcontrol]. Which one should I use?

@ben.wes I like your mouse click logic + clipping better because you can drag outside the control to make things maximum or minimum.

For anyone else is trying to understand your patch, I want to correct my faulty explanation. Firstly, there are 2 canvases in the GOP area, one is the grey background that fills it, and one is a smaller white foreground. This latter one receives messages sent to $0-cnv, not the silly thing I wrote before, and its configured size has to be 1 so that vis_size can go to 1.

@ben.wes Woah! Look how similar my patch is and how little is missing:

I'm really more amazed by the missing part because it really drives home what I don't know! Wait, that didn't come out right. I mean it's like I'm standing next to the Empire State Building asking people "hey, where's is the Empire State Building?"

I can't find (in 10 minutes of happy hour searching) where either the pos or vis_size messages are documented, so here are my guesses from looking at your code:

• sending to $0-cnv sends messages to the containing canvas
• the visibility window just happens to have the exact same color scheme as Reaktor?!!! Unbelievable coincidence.
• the visibility window is anchored relative to its upper left corner, so that's why you did the pos message that way
• and the size of the window extends down and to the right of the visibility window anchor

How did I do, professor? All kidding aside, thanks so much.

This array of squares is allegedly from Reaktor 6, and they're xy controls. The lower left-justified white rectangle denotes where in the grey square the control point is.

How would you recommend I approach making something like this? I'd like the enclosing square to be GOP from an abstraction. I made something that gets the xy coordinates using else/canvas.mouse, but it doesn't display what the current xy value is. Do I have to try to learn data structures (again)?

PS: the actual sq/rectangle colors don't matter to me. I don't see an easy way to paint the GOP window some other color than white.

@whale-av HannahGen has got to be a bot, right?

@willblackhurst A million years ago I tried to interface a Wacom tablet to Pd and remember trying to find a version of [hid] that would work for my machine without success. I've never heard of a nanopad2 until now, but if I needed an x/y interface for a show that was breathing down my neck, I'd jump on it for $79 and its simple MIDI interface, Everything has a cost; it's either your money, or your time. Or both. That said, I'd be happy to be schooled on how to use [hid].

@avenir Look! I know Italian!

Here's what I mean. All the connections in the shaded area are 2 channel snakes, so you only have to multiply, throw~, and catch~ once. But the other way works too.

@crttrkix I think you're still a little off WRT subpatches, and I'm enjoying the crazy c++ metaphors, so I'll continue as if you asked a question . In Pd, an abstraction is like function, and since it's in a separate file, it's like a function in a separate compilation unit that has to be linked in (or in Pd's case, loaded). But a subpatch is more like bracketed code--not that it introduces a new scope (it doesn't, e.g. $0 is the same value inside and outside of a subpatch) but that it's really just a graph that's been hidden except for its inputs and outputs. That's why [pd mySubpatch-$1] is just a renaming of the subpatch--it's just a labelled section of code.

@avenir FYI, you know how you are applying the grain envelope to the output of snake~, 1 for each channel? You could also just apply it to the snake once and it affects both channels. That's the point of snake~--to help reduce uninteresting duplication.