Auto-arrange & traces

Two helpers on the back canvas keep a complex rig parseable: Auto-arrange rearranges nodes by signal-flow depth, and the chain trace highlight lets you see exactly what feeds what.

Auto-arrange

Click Auto-arrange in the top toolbar. Stagewright runs an audio-aware layout pass:

1. Build audio adjacency (who feeds whom; MIDI wires skipped so they don't pull instruments away from their audio chains).
2. Assign each connected node a column = longest-predecessor depth. audio-in pinned to column 0; audio-out pinned to the deepest column + 1.
3. Orphan nodes (no audio wires either way) get classified by port topology: output-only nodes (a midi-in, an unwired BooleanControl) land in the far-LEFT orphan column; input- only or bidirectional orphans land in the far-RIGHT column.
4. Within each column, sort by node kind + height (tall cards first), then run a barycentric pass to nudge each card to the median Y of its predecessors, wires read straight instead of zig-zagging.
5. Space cards top-to-bottom by their actual height + a gap, so an 18-channel audio-out doesn't crush a 200px neighbour into half its render budget.

Idempotent: re-running on an already-arranged graph produces the same positions (modulo the barycentric pass converging).

Chain trace

Click any source card and Stagewright highlights every node downstream of it, all the way to audio-out. Useful when:

• A rig has three reverbs and you need to know which one is on the Guitar path.
• You're about to delete a card and want to see what gets orphaned.
• You're debugging signal flow ("does this plugin actually reach the output?").

The trace updates live as you re-wire (the trace re-computes on every connection change so the highlight stays honest).

Click again on the same card or anywhere else to clear.

Bring to front

Newly-loaded plugins land at the centre of your current viewport, and clicking any card promotes it to the top of the DOM stack (so wires + small cards don't get hidden under a tall mixer that happens to overlap them).

The z-stack is stored alongside positions in the project file, your "this card is on top of that one" arrangement persists.