Minimize or Maximize all Project Windows as a Group

[Mr._Jim]

Has anyone thought of providing a means for the user to minimize and maximize an entire project at a time?

I can think of several ways to accomplish this, but I'd rather leave my suggestion open-ended.  I'm proposing this idea because I frequently have three or more projects open at a time and am constantly switching between them.  It can be cumbersome to sort out the windows, especially if the projects' members look similar or have similar architectures.

Thanks!

[G-Money]

I like the idea. I wish that there was a way to control the Windows 7 preview pane that pops up when you hover over the taskbar. It needs some graphical hierarchy added to it. It would be nice if you could hover over the LabVIEW icon in the taskbar and it would expand up to three nodes that were three open LabVIEW projects say and then tree out to all the VIs associated with each project respectively. You could then click either the project you wanted and that would spur all the windows associated with that project to come to the top with the project on top or you could just click the particular VI you wanted. I can't think of what way would work best to implement this functionality though. Would you expect like a right-click menu or more keyboard shortcut type actions?

[Mr._Jim]

When you spoke of the preview pane / taskbar enhancement, that's pretty much exactly what I was thinking of!  It sounds like the OS GUI doesn't easily support it, though.

I hadn't even thought of a context menu or keyboard shortcut, but either might conceivably work.  Right clicking on the respective instance of Project Explorer might reveal a context menu option to minimize / maximize all project members.

As for keyboard shortcuts, something could be set up such that pressing something like ALT+[int] would cycle through open projects and respective members.  (e.g. ALT+1 would minimize all LabVIEW windows except for those belonging to the first project opened.)  I suppose a key could be mapped analogous to Windows ALT+Tab whereby one could cycle through projects.  Furthermore, a preview window similar to Windows ALT+Tab might suit this purpose well.

What I was thinking of initially, though was adding some functionality to the "Window" menu.  Perhaps there's some way to enhance this menu so that the user could select a project and bring it into focus along with all of its members.

I'm not sure what the most intuitive way would be to do this, but it would probably be a combination of the ideas we've brought up.

[GregSands]

I'd just been considering posting the same request.  It looks like it would need to be managed from within LabVIEW rather than the OS. I'd be happy if it was just a simple connection between the Project window and its VIs - bring a Project to the front and its VIs follow, minimize a Project and its VIs all get minimized.

[EduNI]

@Greg
With any VI showing you can select View and show This VI in Project to show the project.

I love this idea! Can I give more than one Kudo? 🙂  So many times I have multiple projects open and want to minimize all the the windows in the current project. How about placing it under the Project's Window toolbar pull down menu?  You could call it "Minimize All This Project"