Suggestion - Node Inspector Copy to Clipboard, Paste Code Snippet

[brokenstyli]

Hi, I have suggestion for improving MotionCanvas's Node Inspector, specifically the copy-to-clipboard function it has currently.

I'm not entirely sure if this is possible, but if it is... it would very much help a beginner user like myself.

Currently if you click on an object in the Scene Preview and open up the Node Inspector, you can click on a variable value and it copies the value to the clipboard. I think a novel use for copy-to-clipboard would be if you clicked on a variable name/value, it gives you the exact code snippet, with both the value already in it and the most up-to-date syntax for MotionCanvas.

For example, (in v3.15.2) suppose you already have a Circle in the scene with ref={myCircle} at position x={0}, y={15} and want to translate the Circle 10 pixels down over one second.

• click on the Circle in the preview to open up the Node Inspector
• click the arrow in "position" to split/reveal the Y position
• click the y position value
• the following is copied to clipboard;
  myCircle.position.y(15),

This would give me the code with the right syntax, and I could start modifying it immediately and append the required .to(-10,1) to animate it downwards.

And if I were to need to animate rotation, scale, etc... with some forethought, I can prep an entire yield* all(); code block ahead of time by repeatedly copy-pasting from the Node Inspector, and then make my adjustments as needed (similar to After Effects where if I know I need three separate Sliders for expressions to control position, scale, rotation of a layer, I can just drag three Slider effects onto a layer ahead of time and then adjust their functionality when I get around to it).

To my knowledge, the Node Inspector already does something similar? If you just click the "position" value without expanding the arrow, the text it copies is {"x":0,"y":15}, so it looks like it's already distinguishing between different variables and pre-pend/appending strings. Wouldn't it just be the same thing, just pre-pending a different string like myCircle.position. ?

If this is possible, then obviously it should also come with a toggle in the settings tab so if you only want/need the raw values you can switch back to it.

[aarthificial]

While we could add an ability to copy the property path (like position.x(5)) there is no way for us to know the name of the variable used to store the reference (i.e myCircle)