Use midi bindings or lua script to show a plugin window (toggle)?

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

I am sorry but i cant find any literature to answer the question on how to use midi bindings to show a plugin window (toggle) specified by a specific track and indexed in that track by number?

Lets say for example i want to make the second plugin on track 20 visible or even toggle its visibility.
Bad example of code:
<Binding channel=“1 ctl=“87"” uri=”/route/plugin 20 2"/>

Any way to do with midi binding or lua script?

#2

You can’t do that with a regular MIDI binding. MIDI bindings can access anything that exists as an “action” in the GUI, but there is no action for “show the plugin window for the Nth plugin of track T” (mostly because actions cannot take arguments, and so N and T cannot be specified). We could theoretically add an action for “show the plugin window for the first selected plugin”, but that does not currently exist.

You may be able to do this in Lua (someone else will have to comment on that).

#3

so i am a bit out of my depth on Ardour src code which may be apparent from my question. Apologies if this is basic.

I installed ripgrep and was trying to find out if there were any usages of commands to “display the plugin GUI”. I saw a post where user fretboard used ripgrep to look for usages of new audio_track and thought I could try it to tease out if there were analog application to discover " ```
plugin:show_gui()":

rg new_audio_track -g '*.{h,hpp}' -A10

The best i could find was plugin_uri but not sure if this is close.

I am not having much luck though. Any thoughts?

Appreciatively

#4

I don’t believe you can do this, even with Lua, since you cannot pass any arguments to GUI Actions, as paul pointed out. Otherwise you could trigger a Lua Action script, which then shows the GUI.

I suppose you could indirectly pass information. Say show 1st GUI of the a selected track,
or show plugin GUI when touching a plugin control.

Alternatively someone could extend the generic MIDI bindings surface and directly add support there. Other, more specific, control-surfaces (e.g. Faderport 8/16) have built-in support for editing plugins and can show/hide plugins UIs.

#5

I am not sure how much of an time investment with coding this would take but adding this as an action “show the plugin window for the first selected plugin” and an ability to also select a plugin by track and index number would but really help all users.

I looked for this same thing a while back and remember Mixbus discussed this.

https://forum.harrisonconsoles.com/thread-10937.html

They used:
ProcessorMenu/edit

but when i tried it i could not get it to work.