so many minutes manually configuring constant combinators... in my past! thanks to huancz! a perfect mod for the logistics-shunning belt-loving player of factorios from home to the farthest reaches of the galaxy!

if it's possible for it to delete any empty anonymous signal groups when you paste, that would be convenient, particularly when pasting to a new constant combinator

Re: deleting empty groups. It's almost guaranteed to be possible, and I agree it would make sense. But that would mean more messing with lua, which makes my skin crawl. I already learned enough new reasons to hate it that will give me nightmares for a while.

(I exaggerate here of course, but this is a cosmetic feature, empty group doesn't break anything and it's just one click to delete if. It's unlikely I'll try myself in the near future. Unless someone is bothered enough by it to create PR).

I'll just leave this here in case you decide to implement it. Altering Line 11 of control.lua to

local control = dest.get_or_create_control_behavior()

for n = control.sections_count, 1, -1 do
    control.remove_section(n)
end

will clear existing signals from the combinator. You'll probably want to implement a per-player setting for this and wrap the loop in its own condition.

I looked at this code while bumping for factorio 2.1. I wouldn't mind to merge code that deletes empty groups. But this deletes everything. I consider it a good feature that I can paste the signal multiple times, and I get multiple same groups of signals that I can tweak.

Apologies. Reading over this again, I can only conclude that I must have skimmed the post and written the code the way I wanted it to behave. Personally speaking, I would expect it to completely overwrite all existing groups, so it would act like when you copy from Assembling machine -> Requester chest.

Adjusting the code to follow the OP more accurately looks something like this:

local control = dest.get_or_create_control_behavior()
for n = control.sections_count, 1, -1 do
    local sect = control.get_section(n)
    if sect.group == "" and sect.filters_count == 0 then
        control.remove_section(n)
    end
end

Released as 0.1.4, thanks.