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Wire Manager
The wire manager offers the ability to choose more colors for the patch cables that you use in your patches. It also has highlighting options which some users may find useful in tracing wires around the patch.
Colors
The colors page of the wire manager offers a list of different colored wires. To the left of each wire is a checkbox. When you make a new connection in VCVRack, a color for that wire is chosen from the list of wires that are checked. The list is cycled, so if you select only Red, Yellow and Green wires in the wire manager, the first wire you add to your patch will be Red, the next Yellow, the third Green and then back to Red.
If you wish to connect all of the right channel of a stereo signal in Red, you might choose to select only the Red wire in the wire manager, and then to wire up the entire right channel signal chain. Then change to a Dark Grey wire to wire the left hand signal chain.
Or perhaps you just want all of the wires to be pink to celebrate Valentine's Day.
The top-most checkbox in the list allows you to select / deselect all the colors.
At the top of the list on the right hand side is a plus icon. This will take you to the editing page to create a new wire color which will be placed an the bottom of the list when you save it.
To the right of each color are some more icons. These allow you to move your colored wires up or down the list to choose the order of them, and the three dots icon takes you to an editing page where you can change the color of the wire. This editing page also has the option to delete the wire.
Editing
On the editing page there are save and cancel buttons, and a delete button (which will offer you a further chance to change your mind).
There are three sliders here to adjust the color of the wire. Although they are not deliberately not labelled, the sliders control the Red, Green and Blue parts of the color. Each slider has a gradient background accurately showing the colors that will result from moving that slider.
Right-clicking on any slider will return it to it's unedited position.
Settings.
The settings page currently has two functions.
Variation
When the variation option is enabled, the color chosen for your wire is randomly varied. You might wish to use all green wires for a patch, but if this option is enabled, you can have lots of slightly different green wires, emulating a collection of patch cables acquired over a long and happy period of modular experimentation.
The three sliders allow you to fine tune the type of variation introduced.
H: is the hue or actual color of the wire
L: is the lightness of the wire, from a deep dark red, to a light pale pink for example
S: is the saturation of the wire, how deep the color is. Wires with a low saturation will appear more gray.
Highlighting
When the highlighting option is selected, an additional transparency is added to the wires in the patch. When you hover over a module in the patch, only those wires connected to that module will be shown with normal opacity. This may help you to trace pathways in complex patches. You can quickly point to a module and see where each wire goes.
There are two highlighting options, they differ in what happens when you are not pointing at a module, when you are pointing at empty space in the rack. Always On will still fade all the wires when you are not hovering over any module; When Hovering will only fade wires away when you are pointing at something.
Sizing
Minimize
The Minimize icon will shrink the size of the module browser down to 1-HP. All the modules in the patch to the right of the module browser will be move to the left to take up the space.
When the module browser is minimized, a Restore button is visible in the centre of the module. Selecting this will restore the module to its previous size. All modules to the right of the module browser will be moved to the right to make space.
In this way you can keep the module browser in your patch for ready access, without taking up more space than is necessary.
Saving.
Once the wires have been connected in your patch, you do not need to keep the wire manager around. You can minimize it to save space, but if you remove it from the patch completely, the wires will still retain their colors. Highlighting will not function without the wire manager in the patch.
The settings that you make are global. They are not saved along with the patch, so your favorite collection of colored wires is available in every patch that you add wire manager to.
Do not add more than one wire manager to your patch. It will do no harm, but only one of them will be actually selecting the colors and the other will be wasting CPU.