[Feature Request] Copy views between envs & share views on compare.

I use multiple environments for different trials and modifications of my model trainings. Usually I run in the ‘main’ environment, fork it when it is complete and start a new training in the ‘main’ environment. This way, I only define views in the main environment and once I fork the environment, the currently selected view becomes the ‘only’ view for the fork.

While this setup works quite fine, I do feel the current way of handling views is quite limiting:

• If I accidently drag one of the panels, distorting the view in one of my environments, I lost that view on the data. As these forked environments do not have the same saved views, I have to recreate it.
• If you plot directly in different environments, but want to have the same views for different envs, the only possible way as of now is to recreate your view in each environment.

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I feel there are 2 ways you could go about fixing this:

• Implement something like global views, that work for any environment. While this might seem weird at first, because not every environment has the same panels, it does have the merit of being useful when comparing 2 environments. The global views could namely be created when comparing env A with env B, saved, and then reused at a later stage when comparing env C with env D.
• Implement a way to copy over views from one environment to another. This is probably easier to implement, but would not help when comparing environments.

[0phoff]

Forking a view from your code would actually completely solve my particular issue/annoyance with visdom.

I understand that it is not completely the same as what I was describing above, but if that is too difficult to achieve, feel free to close this once forking is implemented! 😃

[0phoff]

I use the same window IDs, as it is just the same script running with eg. different parameters or different input data, so copying views would indeed be easy here.

You could check which windows are actually in the new env when copying over a view, but that would be somewhat limiting as you could not copy over the view before all the panels are created. (eg. I run tests every few epochs, so the testing panels are not yet created upon startup)
I think the best approach would be to just copy over the view with all existing panel IDs, and leave it up to the user to integrate new panels into that view etc.

With union of the views you mean that all the views of the envs being compared can be selected from the dropdown? That would indeed solve most use cases I can see, without being too complicated to implement!

Talking about comparing, one thing that botters me is the legend when comparing envs…
I understand this is probably the easiest way to implement it, but I do feel the legend shoud be in the header/sidebar… /rant

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I think this issue can be split up in 2 parts:

• Allow a user to copy over views from one env to another
• When comparing envs, allow the user to select any of the views from the different envs that are being compared.

If you manage to implement these 2 things, that would solve my issues and I would be an extremely happy user! 💛