LabVIEW Idea Exchange
Whilst developing code I often need multiple copies of a subvi on my block digram. I create my duplications by click-dragging with CTRL pressed, which creates a copy. To make sure the copy is aligned horizontally with the original I'm forced to look for the little 'delta' box that appears somewhere randomly on the screen (see image). To make sure the copied subvi is perfectly aligned I have to ensure the second coordinate is zero, indicating no movement in the vertical direction, and then I know my error wire will pass neatly across to the copy, as will any other data wires that pass right through the subvi. This is ok, but sometimes it needs the tiniest movements of the mouse to get it positioned pixel perfect, which is tiresome.
In other programs it's quite typical to press both CTRL and SHIFT together and the motion of the copied item is restricted to either just horizontal or vertical movements. I believe this would be ideal in LabVIEW for the creation of multiple copies of subvis/functions/primitives on the block diagram, all perfectly aligned horizontally/vertically. My snapshot below shows just a fraction of a lengthy vi I have for importing various datas from an encoded file. There are quite a few copies of the PCC Open subvi and each one had to be carefully copied - with CTRL+Shift I could have created them all much more easily.
