I would very much like to see a way for the selection in the node tree to scroll the selected component into view in the editor.
It can be disconcerting when a node is selected and then you start editing the properties but you don’t have the component in view in the editor.
Ideally when clicking on a node it would be scrolled into view in the editor. But it might be the case that some additional action makes this happen, possibly a double-click.
Would something like this be feasible?
While we are on the topic of node/editor navigation I would find it incredibly useful if there was something like a scroll to top in the Elements editor. When doing mobile first development I seem to spend a lot of time scrolling back to the top of the editor. In fact, it would be nice to have it work both ways, scroll to the top or bottom. Although if my first request in this post was implemented this would satisfy my needs as I could simply select a node at the bottom of the tree to have it scrolled into view.
UPDATE: one other addition I would like to see in the Node Browser is the ability to color code the root nodes. So in addition to being able to give them unique names, also allow a background color to be set. This would make visually navigating the tree so much easier.
A minimum coloring option would be to add a background color to globals that are in the node tree. The breadcrumb at the bottom of the window already does this by coloring them GREEN, why not also do the same thing in the node browser as it would make finding them much easier. The coloring is also used in the editor for the component label, why not do this in the node browser as well.
And the reverse, when a component is selected in the editor, the node view scrolls to the component in its view (it already selects it, but if not in view, it doesn’t scroll to bring it in view)
I agree, these selections should always be in sync and in view. It gets highly confusing if you are working something that is not visible, but selected.
At the very least we should colour the Globals green
Yes, we should probably support this both ways, I’ll add a ticket for it!
Hmm, the current selection is always the last in the breadcrumb trail, making it easy to navigate back up the tree. But you want to show the entire tree around an object?
I think having children of the selected elements would be useful in being able to quickly traverse a single branch of the tree, as well as providing some indication of where the current object sits in the hierarchy. I see it as a convenience from always having to switch to the node browser, which will always provide a more complete, but more complex representation of the entire tree.
The main difficulty would be communicating elements that have multiple children, such as flex/grid elements or groups. If possible, having a drop-down/pop-up to select which child you want to focus on, with the node view (if visible), viewport and structure bar all updating at once to reflect the current selection.
I think the node tree is awesome. I cannot imagine working in Elements without it. I look forward to the day when it can hopefully always be visible in the UI to make adding elements even easier.
I think that the Pages tab and the Page Layout tab (node tree) could usefully be combined. I am not sure what value there is in having them separated?