Wrapping blocks

Whenever I program with Scratch, blocks being too long is always a problem. For example, here are some scripts from my more complicated projects:

And I’ve seen them get much longer than that.

(For reference, Snap! does use block wrapping, so having the editor open while reading this might be useful…)

I think it would be helpful if (vertical) blocks would automatically re-layout themselves when they start becoming pretty long, so that you can see them all in a conveniently short (but still long enough to work with) space.

This would also probably help with organizing scripts - “clean up” would make columns of more similar width.

Here’s what the example scripts above look like in Snap!:

However, block wrapping brings up a couple of questions. What should we do with input literals?

In Snap!, they don’t wrap at all:

It’s possible that we could make inputs wrap like normal blocks on the inside.

For a more internal question - should blocks have specific line break points, or should breaks happen dynamically? Or should there be a combination of both?

Here’s an example in Snap! with manual line breaking (I added %brs to the spec of the blocks):

They definitely look better than before.

But then you get this, when there aren’t any input values:

…which doesn’t look so great. So it’s a little puzzling, exactly how manual/dynamic breaks should be handled…

Here’s the project.xml download for the demo Snap! project: http://www.mediafire.com/download/6iu71f1737kqqok/Wrapping_Demos.xml

And of course this is just all an idea. 😃

(Edit 2018 03 18: Formatting fixes.)

[CatsAreFluffy]

What about a right-click option for showing the block in the palette?

[towerofnix]

Possibly a smooth animated scroll to where it is in the palette (if you have the category selected) to give you a better idea of where it is relative to other blocks?