After the new masking panel has been pushed to master, a lot of users who had not followed the development found themselves in the difficult position of having to get used to a new masking system (both the model and the UI) without any kind of documentation other than tooltips (when enabled!).
While full documentation will be released only around the time that 5.8 is ready, so that it can include concrete references to the UI that we will sheeip (
vs. 
) , I wanted to share some early docs to make it easier to navigate the novelty. I will try to keep them as up-to-date as possible with the development.
Note that the model will not change at this point (at least, not noticeably). On the other hand, the UI has still a considerable margin for improvement, and as a matter of fact I am in the process of opening a PR for a major-ish revamp that addresses many of the main pain points that have been brought to my attention.
So, while the reasoning behind building a mask will not change, the actual UI patterns to do this or that operation are still open to change.
Building masks in Flexi
This is a very general document explaining how to think about masks in terms of groups and operators. If you understand this, you are 90% there. The rest is just a matter of getting used to the UI.
UI reference
This is an overview of the UI functionalities, and reflects the latest “major” UI version that you will find in the nightly builds. I will not update it following every little change, but if there are significant changes I will make sure that they are reflected here. It does not contain screenshots, because as I said the UI is not final, but it contains a reference of all the available options, including some that currently are less discoverable.
Hope you find it helpful, and thanks for your patience!
It’s a joke of course, as a non native english speaker I often make the same mistakes