I have always wanted to make more use of Pure Data, but being so used to the Max workflow, the transition always felt clunky to me. To bridge this gap, I’ve made a GUI plugin that implements some Max hotkeys and UI behaviour into Pd. Get it from GitHub: maxhotkey-pd.

The full list of features is in the readme. Adding them was harder than it should be: Pd (the core, “vanilla” version) uses an ancestral GUI scripting language called Tcl/Tk whose main advantage include cross-platform compatibility (Windows, OSX, Linux) and… that’s about it? Definitely not modern graphics, which is one reason why various forks exist that try to give Pd a modern look.

For now, though, I just wanted a basic, stable and lightweight version of Pure Data that just behaves more like I’m used to from Max. For instance, one of the subtle quality-of-life features in Max is that, once you create a new object (N key), it hides the mouse cursor so you can focus on typing the object name. In Pd, after pressing the key combo (Ctrl+1) you have click the mouse and then move it away in order to see what you’re typing. This obviously isn’t the end of the world if you get used to it, but the Max way is just so much smoother.

So I had to get my hands dirty with Tcl… Luckily there’s a few great people on the pdpatchrepo forums who helped me get started. There are still quite a few things I’d like to add, so if you want to lend a hand then head over to the GitHub repo or forum thread!