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Inspector Feature Reference

This page is a feature-by-feature reference for the RRational Inspector desktop app. For a high-level orientation, start with Inspector standalone app. For the end-to-end walkthrough, open Help → Workflow walkthrough from inside the app.

The features below match the in-app menus, dialogs, and side panels as of the v0.9 release (Cluster A–D + R15–R16 feature waves).

Visual features

HUD (Heads-Up Display)

A compact panel anchored in the top-right corner of the tachogram. It tracks the cursor and shows three live values:

Field Meaning
t Time at the cursor (mm:ss)
RR RR interval at the cursor (ms)
HR Instantaneous heart rate (60 / RR) (bpm)

Toggle: keyboard H, or View → Show HUD readout. The state persists in QSettings across sessions.

Crosshair

A vertical reference line that follows the cursor. Useful for aligning event markers and reading off precise time-stamps.

Toggle: keyboard C, or View → Show crosshair.

Zen mode

A one-stroke "hide everything that isn't the data" toggle — turns off the HUD and Crosshair together. Built for screenshots, presentations, and screen recordings where on-screen overlays are distracting.

Toggle: keyboard Z. There is no equivalent menu item because the shortcut is the design — the action is intentionally fast.

Color schemes

RRational ships three palettes:

Palette Use case
Okabe-Ito (default) Colorblind-safe, Nature-recommended
Viridis Continuous, perceptually uniform
Custom User-defined hex codes

Switch via Edit → Preferences → Color Scheme. Changes apply immediately to every plot in the inspector — no restart needed.

For publication, keep Okabe-Ito unless your journal mandates otherwise. It is distinguishable for the roughly 8% of readers with red-green colorblindness (deuteranopia / protanopia).

Overview bar

A reduced-scale strip below the main tachogram showing the whole recording at a glance. A light rectangle marks the current viewport.

  • Pan: drag the rectangle left or right.
  • Zoom: drag the edges of the rectangle.
  • Stripes: mirror the main plot — warm gray for exclusion zones, magenta for annotations.

Toggle: View → Show overview bar.

Zoom presets

Three numeric jumps for common review windows:

Key Action
1 Last 1 minute
2 Last 10 minutes
3 Full recording

Plus R to reset zoom to the full recording, Home to jump to the first 60 s, End to jump to the last 60 s.

Keyboard panning + zooming

Key Action
← / → Pan 25% of the visible window
↑ / ↓ Zoom out / zoom in

All keys work with focus on the plot.

Content features

Compare HRV curves

Overlay RR curves from multiple .rrational files side by side with bootstrap confidence intervals. Open via Tools → Compare HRV curves….

The dialog has:

  • Group A / Group B dataset checklists (Group B is optional).
  • Confidence level spinbox — default 95%.
  • Plot button — renders the overlay in a new window.

The shaded band around each mean curve is the bootstrap 95% CI — wider bands indicate more between-participant variability; non- overlapping bands suggest a group difference worth testing formally in the Analysis tab.

Annotation stripes

When you enable Annotation mode (A) and drag a time range, the range is recorded as a (t_start, t_end, text) annotation. Annotated ranges show as magenta stripes in both the main plot and the overview bar. Open the cross-recording annotation table from Tools → Annotations….

Exclusion stripes

Same drag pattern but with Exclusion mode (E). Excluded ranges are shown as warm-gray stripes and are skipped by every downstream analysis. The exclusions are saved into the project's per-recording metadata so they survive close/reopen.

UI components

Info dock

A right-side dock with metadata for the currently active dataset: participant ID, group, sequence, beats count, duration, duplicates. Toggle via View → Show Info panel.

Participant grid

Multi-recording overview for batch review. Each tile shows a mini-tachogram + key metrics; clicking a tile loads the recording into the main view. Available in the Participants tab.

Empty state widget

When no dataset is loaded, the central plot area shows a friendly empty state with links to File → Open project… and File → Import from. This replaces the previous "blank plot" UX.

Workspace tree badges

In the left sidebar's workspace tree, each loaded dataset shows two small badges:

  • Artifact count — number of detected artifacts after correction.
  • Annotation count — number of saved annotations.

Hover any row for the full file path tooltip.

Status bar context

The bottom status bar carries three persistent indicators plus context hints:

Slot Content
Left Project badge — click to switch projects
Center Tab-specific hint (e.g. "Choose a metric preset to begin")
Right Active dataset name + section count

Context hints change on every tab switch via the internal _on_tab_changed_hint handler.

Full keyboard shortcuts reference

For the complete shortcut table see Inspector keyboard shortcuts. The most-used keys at a glance:

Key Action
R Reset zoom to full recording
1 / 2 / 3 Jump to last 1 min / 10 min / full
← / → Pan 25% of visible window
↑ / ↓ Zoom out / zoom in
Home / End First / last 60 s
A Toggle annotation mode
E Toggle exclusion mode
H Toggle HUD readout
C Toggle crosshair
Z Zen mode (HUD + crosshair off)
F1 Open keyboard shortcut reference

Where to next