Lighttable

Lighttable is a small, fast desktop app that ships in the Flux repository as a companion — not one of Flux’s workspaces, but the step before them. Analysis batches produce piles of images: a parameter sweep at five settings, per-cell outputs across conditions, one plot per model. Lighttable is the light table you spread them on: a grid of every image in one variant, instant flipping between variants (each cell swaps in place, like a flip-book), fullscreen inspection, and side-by-side comparison of one item across every variant.

You explore the many in Lighttable; you compose the chosen few in Flux.

How it thinks: collections, sets, items#

Lighttable opens a collection — a plain folder whose subfolders are sets (one per variant), each holding one image per item, aligned by filename:

sweep/                        ← the collection (the folder you open)
├── smoothing-0.1/            ← a set: one variant of the batch
│   ├── cell_007.png          ← an item, keyed by its filename
│   ├── cell_012.png
│   └── …
├── smoothing-0.5/            ← another set — same item filenames
│   ├── cell_007.png
│   └── …
└── smoothing-2.0/
    └── …

The alignment is the whole trick: smoothing-0.1/cell_007.png and smoothing-2.0/cell_007.png are the same cell, so switching sets flips every image in place. A set missing an item shows a placeholder — the grid never shifts, so partial sets are fine. Sets are flat (no nesting inside), loose images in the collection root form an “All” set, and the usual image formats work (PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, GIF, AVIF, BMP). Name items consistently and zero-pad (cell_007, not cell_7) — sorting is natural everywhere.

Making a collection is ordinary analysis code: loop conditions × items and save each image to <collection>/<condition>/<item>.png. Plain matplotlib is fine here — these are triage images, not blessed figures. When a winner emerges, regenerate it properly via fluxplot into the project’s plots/.

A collection can live anywhere, but the natural home for one belonging to a paper is plots/_lighttable/<collection>/ inside the Flux project — the _lighttable folder is reserved precisely so a sweep of ten thousand triage images never turns up in the plot importer’s search. It stays reachable on purpose: type _ in the gallery (Alt+G) to enter the folder and search inside it, which is how a triage image gets imported when you decide it belongs in a figure after all.

Running it#

Lighttable runs from the Flux source checkout (it isn’t bundled into the packaged app):

cd ~/flux/lighttable         # or wherever you cloned Flux
npm ci                       # first run only — exact install from the committed lockfile
npm start -- ~/sweep         # build + run, opening the collection

npm start is npm run build && electron ., so there’s no separate build step to run before it. If you only want Flux’s title-bar Lighttable button to work and don’t need to open it right now, npm run build on its own is the alternative — the button launches it for you.

Lighttable has its own dependencies and build, entirely separate from Flux’s — run these from inside lighttable/, never from the repo root.

Once it’s open you can also drop a folder onto the window, use the Open picker, or pick from Recents.

From inside Flux, the Lighttable button on the right side of the title bar (next to the Docs button and Settings gear) launches it directly — a fresh window if it isn’t running, or the existing one brought to front. The button needs the one-time npm ci plus a build — either npm run build, or one npm start, which builds on its way up. If either is missing it tells you which.

Using it#

The grid. Arrow keys move; Enter (or clicking a cell) opens the image fullscreen; 1–9 jump straight to set N and Tab cycles sets — this is the flip-book. [ and ] change the column count, / searches items, c toggles filename captions, and Escape backs out of whatever you’re in.

Detail view (fullscreen one image): ←/→ step through items (skipping gaps), ↑/↓ flip sets without leaving the image, Enter toggles fit vs. 1:1, -/= zoom.

Compare view: Ctrl+click a cell (or Ctrl+Enter) lays out that one item across all sets at once, tiles packed as large as they fit and captioned by set name — the “which smoothing do I believe?” view. Click a tile to fullscreen it; Escape steps back.

Sister collections: click the collection name (top-left) to see the folders sitting beside the current one and switch with one click — so triage/monday_sweep/, triage/tuesday_sweep/ becomes one-click history. Ctrl+click the name for the folder picker. Grid spacing is adjustable in the ⋯ menu.

Where it stops#

Lighttable knows nothing about Flux projects — no captions, no manifests, no citations, just folders of images, kept deliberately separate so it stays instant at any batch size. When an image graduates from “candidate” to “figure panel”, that’s your cue to leave the light table: regenerate it with fluxplot and build the real thing in Figure.

Troubleshooting#