Bring back x.colormapgui() (and add color related resources on the web/wiki)?

[jypeter]

@doutriaux1 I have just spent some time on the web site and wiki looking for some information/documentation about vcs and colors. Either I have been very unlucky, or there is no web page on this rather important topic. I have even started uvcdat in case I quickly saw some menu about color.

I vaguely remember discussions about viridis, transparency and other color related stuff but I have not found any page about this. I have found CDAT/cdat#906

Would it be possible to bring back the old x.colormapgui() method in vcs, or something similar? This could maybe help people. And at least have a dedicated web page about colors, showing the available colormaps

For the people who never knew this nice vcs panel, I have added below the content of help(x.colormapgui)

Help on method colormapgui in module vcs.Canvas:

colormapgui(self, gui_parent=None, transient=0, max_intensity=None) method of vcs.Canvas.Canvas instance
    Function: colormapgui
    
    Description of Function:
       Run the VCS colormap interface.
    
       The colormapgui command is used to bring up the VCS colormap interface. The interface
       is used to select, create, change, or remove colormaps.
    
    Example of Use:
       a=vcs.init()
       a.colormapgui()
       a.colormapgui(max_intensity = 255)
(END)

I have also added below a few of the old (September 2011!) screenshots I made of colormapgui, in order to help me work with colors

[doutriaux1]

@chaosphere2112 @mattben do you think it would be possible to have this function fireup vcdat and bring in the colormap editor? That would be awesome!

[durack1]

@chaosphere2112 @mattben @doutriaux1 @jypeter 👍 from me too.. Having the colormaps (and all the options) exposed would be great.. Documentation would make UV-CDAT great again..

[mattben]

this is not official released docs. Take it as a alpha

• pre peer reviewed
• use at your own risk

https://uvcdat.llnl.gov/docs/vcs/misc/colormap.html

[durack1]

This relates to some discussion at CDAT/cdat#1345 (comment) (and some palette examples) and also CDAT/cdat#1345 (comment) further down the same page

This is also useful discussion, and some examples of colormaps presented for other software.. CDAT/cdat#906 (comment)

[chaosphere2112]

@jypeter @durack1 @doutriaux1 Not on the timeline for this release. There's no technical reason why we couldn't do this (assuming python's webbrowser module works on your machine). There's technically no reason we couldn't look at going full-bore into the old-school VCS style, where you could launch an editor for anything you're working on. We wouldn't need to launch all of VCDAT, just a small page that uses the vcs-widgets package to render the editor (basically the same way that the Jupyter integration will work) and a embedded HTTP server to handle the "save" action.

[doutriaux1]

@chaosphere2112 obviously not for this release (code freeze already happened anyway) but yes for CDAT 1.0 (or a beta before that).

[doutriaux1]

this will be part of VCDAT 2 and can be done in VCDAT 1.0