I just noticed yesterday that Node Wrangler’s geometry nodes preview feature (Alt+Shift+Left Click to connect a node to the group output) was removed by this commit:
Node Wrangler: remove obsolete Geometry Nodes preview
As of the Geometry Nodes viewport preview added in c55d38f00b8c, this is now
built-in and the fature in Node Wrangler is obsolute.Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16102
This feature was not obsolete, as the built-in feature and Node Wrangler’s feature did different things. Node Wrangler’s behaviour would connect a node directly to the group output, whereas the preview feature uses the viewer node instead. The two differ in the following ways:
- Node Wrangler’s old behaviour wasn’t just useful for previewing but also for quickly selecting geometry to output. Now a node link has to be dragged all the way from a node to the group output node, which may be far away. The viewer node is great for temporarily previewing part of a node tree. But often one just wants to quickly change which geometry is being output, which is what Node Wrangler allowed.
- the viewer node is disabled when selecting another object, meaning the previewed geometry disappears in the viewport (unless the geometry nodes editor is pinned). Conversely, geometry connected to the group output persists.
- Cycles doesn’t render geometry previewed with the viewer node, only geometry passed through the group output.
Essentially the ability to quickly connect a node to the group output has been lost. Is there some way we can regain this feature?