Feature Request: Highlight Aux Send bus if selected

Submitted by windowsrefund on
Forums
Qtractor

This is just a quick idea but it may be very useful? Opinions are very welcome.

Here's the starting place...

Track is selected and mixer (track and bus) is focused as expected.

track-selected

Below the Odin2 plugin, is a AUX Send. The associated bus is located quite far to the right in my mixer panel. In other words, I'd have to reach for the horizontal scroll bar in the mixer in order to find it when I want to get into any plugin(s) attached to the bus. This is tedious and boring so I wonder....

Perhaps if one were to click on an AUX Send in order to highlight it (seen below), the "focus" behavior of the mixer panel could be overridden and the associated Aux Send bus could take the focus?

aux-send-selected

What's nice about this is how easily one would be able to quickly bring the mixer focus back to the track (and associated bus) by simply clicking on the track again in the Arranger window.

Thoughts?

File attachments
track-selected.png
aux-send-selected.png

Submitted by windowsrefund on Mon, 25 Aug 2025 - 16:08

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I'd say that's harder on the eyes and less intuitive. It also doesn't scale. At the core of the request is the idea we should be spending less time "finding things" with our eyeballs while leaning into the software to guide us as needed.

Submitted by windowsrefund on Tue, 26 Aug 2025 - 15:56

Permalink

Kinda hard for me to make out what's what but I assume those are AUX Sends you're clicking on. If so, the associated bus should be given focus. I'm also assuming you've compiled the latest bits.

These are AUX Sends and I used the latest Qtractor, main branch with "git log" showing the patch.
Do I have to use a special theme? I use color scheme "default" and tried with style theme "Fusion" and "default".

I've reviewed the code and there were changes in the comments about "double click."

It works, but if it's an Auxsend, you need a double click to get focus.
I think the expectation is that it will also work with a single click.

EDITED:
It should be a single click, because a double click is the action that opens the plugin window.

You'll most likely want to have the advantage of focus to monitor levels or modify gains on the destination, but you don't want to modify the AuxSend itself. Therefore, opening the window is a nuisance.

However, I don't know if the track focus and AuxSend focus conflict with each other, and if it's possible to fix it. I don't know if Qt has a way to prevent the click from staying on the clicked element and not reaching the parent.

A doubleclick opens the AUX Send window but does not change anything else on my machines.

Submitted by rncbc on Wed, 27 Aug 2025 - 18:14

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indeed there were differences in behavior probably due to Qt version bundled in newer debian13 (trixie) (6.8.2); but not on older debian12 (bookworm) (6.4.2), which behaved quite similar, if not exactly to what is expected--tested under qemu/kvm.

anyway, made some changes and hopefully for the good: v1.5.7.20git.d34cf0 is the new ground base... please test && tell...

cheers

1.) Click track -> output bus ist highlighted
2.) Click Aux Send -> Aux Send's destination bus is highlighted
3.) Click track again -> no change. Aux Send's destination bus is still highlighted
4.) Click another track -> see 1.)

So the remaining issue is 3.)

3.) Click track again -> no change. Aux Send's destination bus is still highlighted

this is not going away anytime soon, so sorry... you'll need to click or select another track and then back to it to get exactly the output bus highlights you had originally as in 4.) then 1.)

yes, it's not exactly perfect, but that's life,... kinda minor issue I believe :)

cheers

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