Add ability to hide tracks without removing them.

[diekhans]

It would be useful to be able to hide a track to prevent it from taking up any screen real estate, without the need to reload it to display it again. Especially great for creating sessions will all relevant data.

[jrobinso]

Noted. How do you envision recovering the track if it's hidden? Also, could you elaborate on "creating sessions with all relevant data"?

[diekhans]

Hi Jim

I am envisioning something similar to the Recorder Panels windows to display tracks. It would include all tracks, even the visible ones. Thus you could have one window to control the visibility of both panels or tracks.

In fact, this could also include the Recorder Panels functionality. On one window, you could control visibility and order of tracks and panels.

This is inspired by the UCSC Browser super tracks, where a panel would be the super track with associated tracks (see attached screen shot).

What I was hinting at with saving sessions with hidden tracks is being able to save a set of tracks and share the with collaborators.

Right now, I am working on an analysis with a bigBed track, three main BAM tracks and about 40 auxiliary BAM tracks. I share the saved XML session with a collaborator via github.

So instead of having a session with the four main tracks and then sending them a list of URLs, I would send them a session with the auxiliary tracks hidden. This would make it super easy to access the auxiliary, including turning them on an off.

If would be perfectly fine, actually desirable, to not load hidden tracks until they are first open. thanks! Mark

[jrobinso]

OK got it, thanks for the clarification. Interesting idea. We might think of this as a "view session" window.

[diekhans]

thank you! Happy to help alpha test anything if you decide to pursue this.