Hi Brian
I asked this before when you re-did it earlier in the year but I don't think you answered it and I see that they haven''t changed in V7 dev
Just curious as to the philosophy behind it
The ones with neither brush (the ones meant as the interface for users) nor pencil (hidden, now that libraries can hide some of their blocks) are either left over from the old color library (the RGB/HSV ones) or (lighten, darken) ones that I used while playing with the library during development and thought people might find interesting.
wait, really? or is it just that they use the "primitive" block?
Yup! In the dev version, right-click the hat block of a script in the Block Editor. You'll see an "in palette" checkbox, on by default.
oh, cool!
Yeah, Jens added it specifically for the sake of the Colors and Crayons library, but it'll be useful for other libraries, too. The APL library has several now-hidden helper blocks, and other libraries have one or two.
The problem with the feature is that if you load the same block from more than one library (e.g., the LET one that's used all over the place), whichever library you load last wins about its hiddenness, which is unfortunate, so I can't hide blocks that are helpers for me, but user-visible in the library from which I borrowed them.