You can make your own object category menu using the attached category_menu plugin. Edit menutree.tcl to customize your layout. You can find out more about what you can do with plugins here:
http://puredata.info/docs/guiplugins
> 2. also read about key bindings-VERY interested in this as i have some RSI issues and shortcuts would be helpful for common tasks.
You can just put the "bind" statements into a text file, name it mybindings-plugin.tcl. Read thru Pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/tcl/pd_bindings.tcl (inside the app) to see the default bindings. There is an experimental 'quick bindings' plugin which lets you do more, but its rough.
using a tiny tiny bit of programming in a plugin, you can do a ton of customization. Here's some example plugins:
thanks a bunch for these Hans-Christoph! i've been looking at the tcl pd_bindings file a bit earlier today. seems relatively straightforward to bind a key to an object, although which objects can be selected and their exact assumed path seems fuzzy to me.
for example 'bng' in the tcl file (Bang) is listed as 'bng.pd_darwin' in pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/extra/vanilla folder. is this the object folder referred to by pd_bindings.tcl? more importantly, if i wanted to create my own key binding to say, a cyclone library object like biquad~, is the search path universal so that the app looks for a file called 'biquad~.pd_darwin' in whatever folder it needs?
as for the context menu, i would be defining both the category and individual elements in menutree.tcl myself, right? so i define categories like 'timing' 'math' and so on, and 'a1 b2', etc becomes the named PD objects like 'counter line'. and we assume PD will search for them in the same manner as the key bindings?
i like the idea of creating a local PD folder to put scripts in so that updates don't overwrite the scripts. makes updating both convenient and more stable, though of course the GUI scripts themselves may need to be altered to accomodate future changes.