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Minty

Allow a repeat of the last action using a function key.

Status: New

A simple request in-line with many Microsoft products. Pressing a function key (F4) repeats the last action.

 

This would save many mouse clicks especially for alignment of controls and indicators, clean-up diagram selection, change font etc.

7 Comments
tst
Knight of NI Knight of NI
Knight of NI

I don't feel the need for this, but I can point out that alignment actions do have a specific "repeat" shortcut - Ctrl+Shift+A for alignment and the same with D for distribution.


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AristosQueue (NI)
NI Employee (retired)

I've thought about this some, but I can't really see cases where I do the same action multiple times in a row in the LV environment. Can you list some examples of actions you do repeatedly without any other intervening editing action? Tst notes that align and distribute have their own repeat mechanism. Perhaps instead of a general mechanism (F4) there's some specific case you have in mind that needs to be easily repeatable?

Manzolli
Active Participant

If you need a change all fonts in many controls at once, you can select the controls all and do it at once. When I need to change a font property in only one of the texts of many controls, the user should do it one by one, repeating the whole formatting process as many times as the number of controls. A repeat last command would be handy in this case, since the user could do the formatting once and apply it to many controls with a click and a repeat Function Key.

André Manzolli

Mechanical Engineer
Certified LabVIEW Developer - CLD
LabVIEW Champion
Curitiba - PR - Brazil
JackDunaway
Trusted Enthusiast
Minty
Member

I was unaware of the alignment short-cut (and the distribution) but I'm unable to find one for resize which I use quite a lot.

 

Manzolli pointed out. Fonts would be extremely useful as would resize selected controls as mentioned above (if it doesn't exist).

 

Selection is another where it could come in handy. Say you have selected a number of controls using "shift select" because drag selection would include controls you don't want affected. Then you accidentally click the panel or diagram. You then have to go through every control again and shift select them all. Yo could just do F4 (or whatever) Its one of those features that you just find useful and time saving like F5 for refresh in browsers (and MAX) only it works on everything.

 

In other areas it reduces awkward short cuts (like ctr+shift+J) to a single digit and (for us lazy people) you don't have to remember (or learn) lots of keyboard short cuts just do it manually one time and repeat. Its one of those features you don't really miss if you don't have it, but once you do have it, you cannot live without.

Manzolli
Active Participant

Sometimes we don't remember or don't know the shortcut. Last time I counted it was more than 110 shortcuts in LabVIEW! In these cases we could do the action and repeat it through F4.

André Manzolli

Mechanical Engineer
Certified LabVIEW Developer - CLD
LabVIEW Champion
Curitiba - PR - Brazil
Ryan_G_EE
Member
I second this request. I am in the middle of changing a bunch of boolean indicators to numeric indicators. It would be SO helpful if I could just click on one, press F4 or something and then click on the next one and repeat. As it is, I have to right click on an indicator to select it and bring up the right-click menu, then pan down to Replace, then pan across to numeric, then pan across again to indicator...too many steps! A repeat last action, or repeat formatting or something like is available in MS Word would be great!