chromosomix 0.8.0

What changed in chromosomix 0.8.0, released on 6 August 2026.

Added

• The tracks beside a map are the tracks in the browser. Everything the 1D browser had grown and the heatmap’s lanes had not, ported across — and ported by moving the implementation rather than copying it, so there is now one of each rather than two that agree today.

  On the lane itself: a colour chip before every track name, which is a click-to-recolour target on screen and a colour key in the exported figure — four lanes used to carry four names in one neutral grey. The value range is editable where it is drawn: a caret opens in the number itself, Enter commits, Escape leaves it, an inverted pair is refused in place, and the untouched end comes from the axis on screen rather than from the file’s whole-genome extent. An autoscale button sits after the range, lit while the axis is the data’s own. ⌘-scroll (Alt elsewhere) over a lane moves that lane’s ceiling, stepping from the range currently resolved rather than from a stored [0, 1] nobody chose.

  In the Aesthetics column: the Groups card, which existed only in the browser — beside a map a group could be made and then never inspected, undone or drawn differently. It lists each group’s members with their colours, hides them together, takes one back out, levels them to their tallest, and carries the two mode toggles. Overlay now works beside the map: a group can collapse into one lane, its members blended, with a column of coloured names and one range under them. So does scale each — the setting was stored, honoured in the browser and silently ignored beside the map, which is the stored value and the picture disagreeing. A stretch button and a track height box join the Plot card, and H works in a map session.

  And in the picture, a bar marking each run of lanes that share an axis. A group was honoured numerically the moment it was made and drawn nowhere, so two tracks on one axis and two that happen to agree looked identical.

• Drag a track’s body to set its ceiling. Press in a lane and move across it — up and down below the map, left and right beside it — and the value axis follows the hand. While the drag is under way the area stays where it was, faded, as the record of the range being left behind; only the top line moves. One trace lifting off its own shadow says what a number changing in a corner could not. Nothing is written until you let go, which is what lets the shadow stand still. Which screen direction means more is asked of the lane rather than assumed: it is opposite on the two edges and reversed again by a flip.

• A track outline. One toggle in either Plot card (I) draws a hairline along the top of every track, in the plot’s ink rather than in the track’s own colour. The boundary between an area’s ink and the paper is the only part of it carrying information, and in its own colour it is the one edge that does not stand out — four stacked areas become four legible shapes.

• Reds in the colormap picker — ColorBrewer’s sequential red, anchored at paper white rather than at its own lowest stop. That stop is #FFF5F0, a pale pink, and most of a Hi-C matrix is empty: on matplotlib’s ramp the map is a sheet of faint pink with the data on it, and the eye reads the tint as signal until it works out that it is everywhere. The two agree from a ninth of the way up, so what differs from metacooler show --cmap Reds is the floor rather than the hue.

Changed

• A track moved to the right of the map turns round. Below the map a lane grows up, towards the matrix; beside it the same track grew away from it, so a figure with both stacks disagreed with itself about which way was more. Moving a track between the two edges now flips its axis, and a file dropped on the right edge arrives already turned. A toggle, not an assignment: a reader who deliberately hung a bottom track from its ceiling gets that back when it comes home.

• A right-hand lane’s name is off its own ink. The caption was pinned to the edge nearest the map, which on that stack is where the signal grows from; it now goes to whichever end of the lane the baseline is not at, which is the rule the bottom stack always followed. A flipped track’s name moves with it — and keeps its caret, which it used to lose.

Fixed

• A lane dragged by its handle beside the map landed on the wrong slot. The drop position was a drawn-lane index handed to a reorder that indexes the card’s whole list, so with any track hidden, still loading, or on the other edge the lane landed a slot early and the last slot could not be reached at all. Every drag now resolves its target by identity, and fires once per slot crossed rather than once per pointer move.

• A cancelled lane drag no longer commits it. pointercancel was bound to the same handler as a release, so a drag the system interrupted over a lit edge rectangle still moved the track to that edge.

• One floor for a lane’s height instead of three. Fourteen pixels in the browser, twelve in the panel and ten in the lane stack, so a lane dragged to eleven was legal on one surface and rounded on another. Twelve everywhere; a lane below it comes back a pixel or two taller on the next reload.