3D panel feature request: enable multiple Publish widgets

[tonynajjar]

Coming from Rviz, it would be nice if the Foxglove 3D panel would allow the creation of multiple "Publish" objects/widgets so we don't have to change the topics all the time. One common example in mobile robots is to have one widget for sending a goal and another to send a pose estimate

[jtbandes]

Another person asked about this in Discord just last week. https://discord.com/channels/1240935776649478144/1309269038274314367

There are "multiple" publish tools, but they are grouped under the same icon. You have to long press on the icon to switch between them:

[tonynajjar]

Ohh nice I didn't know about that but that still limits us to 1 topic per type right? E.g. A navigation goal and a localization pose estimate are both PoseStamped so I can't easily switch between these

[jtbandes]

Does RViz have this ability? My impression was it also had only 3 separate types? (This Foxglove feature was originally modeled off RViz)

[tonynajjar]

Yes pretty sure rviz has that ability. You can't specify a topic on the fly but you can pre-code multiple plugins using the same msg type, publishing on different topics.

[jtbandes]

Closing this issue out – since it was initially filed we've made some other minor UX improvements to the 3D publish tool. As far as I can tell RViz behaves pretty much the same, where there is one tool of each type.