save external tox

Working with git and TouchDesigner isn’t always an easy process, but it’s often an essential part of the process of tracking your work and collaborating with others. It also encourages you to begin thinking about how to make your projects and components more modular, portable, and reuseable. Those aren’t always easy practices to embrace, but they make a big difference in the amount of time you invest in future projects. It’s often hard to plan for the gig in six months when you’re worried about the gig on Friday - and we all have those sprints or last minute changes.

It’s also worth remember that no framework will ever be perfect - all of these things change and evolve over time, and that’s the very idea behind externalizing pieces of your project’s code-base. An assembly of concise individually maintainable tools is often more maintainable than rube golbergian contraption - and while it’s certainly less cool, it does make it easier to make deadlines.

So, what does all this have to do with saving external tox files? TOX files are the modules of TouchDesigner - they’re component operators that can be saved as individual files and dropped into any network. These custom operators are made out of other operators. In 099 they can be set to be private if you have a pro license - keeping prying eyes away from your work (if you’re worried about that).

That makes these components excellent candidates for externalization, but it takes a little extra work to keep them saved and sycned. In a perfect world we would use the same saving mechanism that’s employed to save our TOE file to also save any external file, or better yet, to ask us if we want to externalize a file. That, in fact, is the aim of this TOX.

clone or download from github
github.com/raganmd/touchdesigner-save-external

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