On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, robbert van hulzen wrote:
i don't think the list would have to be a lot friendlier, and splitting things into beginners and überusers would not make me happy. i've been lurking on the list for a while now, learning lots, enjoying the different angles, and happily skipping things that are too far over my head. [...] on to the real reason for my post.
That sounded like a good reason for posting already.
then i was wondering whether there is a way to add more startup paths without using the -path flag, simply to keep things a bit tidy.
If you mean using .pdsettings on Linux, then no, this is currently not tidier in any way. You can't handle more than 10 paths from the GUI and you have to keep track of how many paths you have, give them all unique names in a sequence (path1 path2 path3...), and then tell Pd again how many paths there are because it can't figure it out. In some versions of OSX you'll have this same thing as ~/Library/Preferences/puredata.org.plist which will be a XML file if you're lucky, and if not, it will be a "binary" (non-text) file that is associated with OmniOutliner, which you'll have to learn a bit in order to be able to give pd the same hand-holding as in .pdsettings; I might have been told that OmniOutliner as bundled with OSX is a limited evaluation copy that may or may not expire but I didn't verify that. In Microsoft operating systems, you'll have to use REGEDIT.EXE in a very similar way.
That's my reasons to say that .pdrc is still the main, unchallenged way to configure pd (together with .BAT files on Microsoft). All other ways ought to be deprecated, especially as Pd Extended clearly blows the limits of it two-or-three-fold.
i had some trouble adding paths to the flag,
technically, a flag is an option that doesn't take an argument. The -path option may be called a repeatable option or something, but not a flag.
looking at other patches, thinking lots, and finding / using the tutorials that will explain what i need. which usually gets me to learn about other things too. kind of circular learning (?).
As long as this is not a parallel with circular breathing (an oxygen deprivation technique) or circular reasoning (a logic deprivation technique) then I'm fine with it. :)
Maybe you want to say "hyperlearning" as in hypertext, somewhat like what you get when you let yourself loose on Wikipedia, Everything2, or the whole www, and that you have 94 tabs open at the same time and have difficulty closing them because most of them are still unread and you insist on reading them all before going to a party that started two hours ago. In the process of reading the remaining ones you try to resist the temptation of opening more but alas, ... whatever, been there, done that. ;-)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada