Short Overview Exploration Part 2 - Brackets

Earlier this week I had a post explaining parts of the overview and commenter Rob Kaichin responded:

Any chance of an explanation on brackets? They're the main fustration and mystery to me, especially when I'm flying logi. Can't see who I need to see without showing them all, and can't remove the ones I don't want without not showing them all. Similarly with moons in space, how do I get the brackets to show up?
*tears his hair out*
You're my only hope.

 I'll see what I can do, but I'm a little concerned I don't understand his request, or we are mixing up terminology here.

What CCP calls "brackets" merely refers to the icons of stuff in space. I don't know why they are called brackets, possibly an early version of EVE they were square brackets around an objects location and the term stuck, much like how CCP calls the space where missions take place dungeons.

If you're flying Logistics and doing repairs on fleet members during combat, brackets in space should be your LAST concern, you should be working off your watch list for smaller groups or broadcast history for larger groups.

But if you are trying to get celestial objects to show up without having them appear in the overview, well, then I think I can help.

Tabs 

We talked last time how the overview can have up to 5 tabs setup with each tab having its own rules for which objects appear in the overview based on their Type and pilot State.

Types tab

You make your selections for the rules to determine when something shows up in the overview for the tab and save it, in the image above we called it "general" for my all purpose see-most-things tab.

On the main tab before "Tab Presets" is the "Overview Tabs" tab. On that page you set up the five tabs with names and the specific "preset" to use in the first two columns:

The third column is used to decide which Preset rules to use for figuring out which icons (or brackets) to show on the objects in space. There is a "Show All Brackets" option in which all objects in space that can be seen will have their bracket show whether or not the current tab shows them in the overview.

In my overview I have two tabs, one called "Default" set to preset "general" which shows most things, and a second called "travel" set to preset "warpto" which shows only things like gates, planets, etc.

Here what it looks like in space on my current Default tab:

general preset, show all brackets

In space you can see all brackets, so icons for things like billboards and sentry guns that I have turned off in my "general" preset. If I change to my "travel" tab:

warpto preset, show all brackets

My icons in space have not changed because it still shows all brackets but my overview is simplified.

Now if I go back to my "Default" tab and change the Bracket Preset to "warpto" we see this:

general preset, warpto brackets

We see the overview itself shows what I expect from the selections in "general" presets, but in space I see very little as it applies the limited selection of "warpto" preset. Conversely, switching them in the "travel" tab we get the opposite:

warpto preset, general brackets

We see a limited selection in the overview, but a larger selection in space.

And that is how you control brackets in the overview. Its worth noting that there are short cut key strokes to toggle turning on or off all brackets:

To be honest, I don't know what "Toggle Special Bracket Display" means.

And that's the scoop on Brackets.