a major improvement that i would love to see would be for the player to activate this from map view from far away!! that's what i thought it was when i first downloaded it and i was disappointed. if it did work from map view i think it would be a serious candidate for the best mod on the mod portal!!!

That is definitely not the intention of this mod (to use from map view) and I am not sure what would have given you that idea?

The info on the mod page clearly states the mod's best use case.

These are useful for making / testing many kinds of circuits.

Which is what I use it for mostly.

In addition to this, as a bonus you can do the following!

Also enables toggling Constant Combinators with the same key.

Which becomes invaluable for testing/making circuits and regular game play alike.

Whats more, vanilla combinators, power switches, requester chests and the like can all NOT be changed/used from map view so I don't see your request being implemented here anytime soon. And really, I wouldn't want to see that implemented in this mod.

I understand though it can be an advantage to activate combinators/switches from the map view as I have wanted to do the same before also. Thankfully a mod already exists for just that.

Have a look at https://mods.factorio.com/mod/remote-switch