Ok, lets see. Where to start.
Nqiuist plugin is wrapping text. ACXCheck.
And if I have the VU meter vertical on the left, it only shows if the mouse focus is actually on Audacity. Move into the open screen area and the meter disappears.
And of course drag and drop doesn’t work… what else will I find I wonder
Perhaps next release you would like to test the Release Candidate build or builds for us? 
Anything reported that we thought was a release blocker would be fixed.
The ACX result text does not wrap on Windows, but text size is larger on Mac. You can force line breaks yourself anywhere in the output by adding
\n
at the appropriate place in the Acx-check.ny file.
Steve would know better than I if we can control the width of these Nyquist dialogues.
I don’t see what you see with the vertical meter in El Capitan. If you click outside the Audacity window, the meter and Audacity will disappear, obviously. Please post a screen movie of what happens for you if you like.
Drag and drop to the Audacity icon in the Dock or to the Audacity.app icon does still work (for most file types).
Gale
As far as I’m aware, the size of the Nyquist dialogs is controlled by WxWidgets, which attempts to emulate “standard” behaviour for the operating system it is running on.
This is the same problem that we had when trying to get consistent appearance of “help” screens in Nyquist plug-ins. If a line of text is much over 50 characters in length, the text “may” wrap. To avoid wrapping text, the plug-in developer should ensure that lines of text are less than 55 characters (which can be a bit tricky when returning data of variable length). In other words, it’s a minor bug in that plug-in.
Hello guys. I do understand the problems. I’m a programmer myself. IOS and Mac, and almost any other of the languages over the years.
My system here is this.
Mac mini 6.2 - 2012, Intel Core i7,2.3 GHz, Memory:16 GB. El-Capitan 10.11. 2TB Storage made up of -
Drive 0:HGST HTS721010A9E630. Upper bay. Drive 1:ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB. Lower Bay
Audacity 2.1.2 - Focusrite SOLO Mini Preamp - Shure55SH Series II (Dynamic) - BTSKY™BM-800 (Condenser)
This is the output of the screen in 2.1.1
This is the output in 2.1.2
Wherein the window itself is not the same size - hence the wrapping. Nothing to do with the mac vs windows paradigm.
Robert
A sample movie of the screen, with Audacity 2.1.2 showing the Recording Meter popping in and out of existence …
Quick Time Movie of Recording Bar activity
Wherein … now you see it, now you don’t…
Robert
Excellent. If you know C++ would you like then to subscribe to our developers mailing list and introduce yourself?
We are very short of Mac developers (hence the Audacity issues you complain about) so we would welcome the help.
In 2.1.2 there is exactly the same reduced width in the help text window for Effect > Vocal Remover… . So this is a change as a result of 2.1.2 being upgraded to wxWidgets 3.0.2 and probably not something that we can easily change.
Regardless, larger text on Mac than Windows is not going to help.
Gale
So you appear to be clicking outside the Audacity window as I said, which obviously removes the meter from view. The only thing I don’t understand is why the Audacity main window does not disappear. Have you installed some app that keeps windows on top?
Gale
So you appear to be clicking outside the Audacity window as I said, which obviously removes the meter from view. The only thing I don’t understand is why the Audacity main window does not disappear. Have you installed some app that keeps windows on top?
Gale
Nope, no installed things keeping windows open. Thats what drew my attention to the recording meter. It used to stay there too. Now it does what it does.
I see the same in 2.1.1 as in 2.1.2, external 1024*768 monitor.
None of the Audacity windows are always on top, so I am unclear why you think clicking outside the parent app would not remove all that app’s windows from view.
The simple-minded answer appears to be not to click outside Audacity, or install an app that keeps windows on top.
Does anyone else see what Robert sees?
Gale
As Gale wrote, the changed behaviour is almost certainly due to the updated version of WxWidgets.
Regarding the text in the Nyquist message box, automatic text wrap is handled by WxWidgets trying to emulate standard behaviour for the platform that it is running on. Assuming that you have been using the same computer with the same OS X for all of these tests, it would appear that WxWidgets have tweaked the text wrap so that it now occurs at a slightly shorter line length.
For built-in effects we can specify the window size and the text will then automatically wrap to fit the window, but in this case it is a Nyquist plug-in and Audacity does not know how much text will be returned by the plug-in code until the code is returned. The “catch 22” is that Audacity must create the text window first, and then write the text into it, so the window is one that automatically resizes to fit the contents.
An alternative approach that we could take is to make a “standard size” window based on the screen size (say half the height and width of the screen), and provide resizing handles so that the user can resize the window as necessary. This would be much better in cases where the plug-in returns a lot of text, but in cases where a short error message is returned it would look very silly.
A better solution would be for Nyquist to have greater control over how the text box was created, for example, the ability to specify a minimum height and width. This requires further development of the programming interface between Nyquist and Audacity and is something that I am very keen to happen. In Audacity 2.1.2 there has been some development of this. Specifically, Nyquist can now override the default “split line” behaviour when returning audio, two new “numeric text” controls, access to the system time and date, and access to the decimal separator character. There are many other features that I’d like to see, but there are many competing priorities for developer time, and a limited number of developers.
Regarding the “disappearing” meter.
Not only have we updated to a more recent version of WxWidgets, but Mac OS X has deprecated the old “Carbon” API, so there has been a lot of under-the-hood work updating from Carbon to Cocoa. I don’t know whether the change in behaviour is due to the change in WxWidgets or the change from Carbon to Cocoa, but either way I don’t think there will be much we can do about it. We’ve stayed with the old versions of WxWidgets and the old Carbon API as long as possible, but we have to update before they become obsolete and stop working.
The disappearance of “child windows” does not only affect the meters. It affects all floating toolbars, and the “Screenshot Tools” and probably other parts too. Whether the window disappears or not seems to depend on whether it is a “top level” window or whether it is a “child window” (derived from another window). If it is a child window (as in the case of floating toolbars), then when the parent window loses focus, OS X hides the “clutter” because it assumes that you are no longer using them.
To work around the problem, resize the main window a little larger and dock the meter into the main window.
Thanks Steve, a good detailed explaination. I understand what’s involved here, I really do. I’ve not been complaining mind you, just interested in the workings.
To the extent that I have the git source here, as you are aware. Audacity is a great piece of work, and does what it does brilliantly. I’ll get these couple of books done, and have a serious look at the code. OSX 10.11.3 / Xcode 7.2.1 obviously doesn’t like something about it. Just errors though.