LabVIEW Idea Exchange

I really hate having to dig through a long hierarchy of menus when I know what I want:

Visual Studio (and other MS and non-MS products) have a feature called Intellisense, which is meant to make this easier. Basically, as you type, it pops up a list of matching objects, based on context, so you can quickly select what you want:

It would be nice if LV had a similar feature - click on a property in the property node using the text tool (or Ctrl+click if using the auto-tool) and now you can type in the property name and you will get an Intellisense-like pop-up, which will have all the relevant properties.

Specific features it could have:

1. It should know all the relevant names - full names with the hierarchy (Boolean Text.Font.Color), long names (Mechanical Action) and short names (MechAction). This could probably be similar to how Quick Drop handles shortcuts or they could simply appear as separate items.
2. It should be context sensitive. If the class is Boolean, then there's no need to have Listbox properties in the list.
3. It should match all the properties which include the search string (so "in" on a boolean would match both "Indicator" and "Strings[]") and only them.
4. It should have the ability to use caps for acronyms (e.g. in the above screenshot you could use "BT" instead of "Boolean Text", similar to what appears in this video).
5. It could probably also work on the invoke node, although there it's less needed.
6. It could probably also be used to quickly select a class if you have a class specifier using the same basic mechanism.

This example (LV 2009) shows how useful this could be. You don't need anything installed. Just run the VI and start changing properties.

Caveats:

1. It will only work on the last property in the node.
2. It doesn't have the proper list of names and it doesn't implement all the features in the idea, as this is just a basic example.

Note - this is similar to this idea, but I think that it's much more usable. Also note that the second idea refers to a QDKS which ships with 2010, but that is far from perfect.

While debugging LabVIEW, we often have many VI windows open. It can sometimes be difficult to manage these windows, especially once the debugging session is over. I think we can improve this situation greatly with a minor change to the All Windows dialog. This dialog (launched from the 'Window' pull-down or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-W) currently shows a list of all LabVIEW windows that are currently open:

There are several columns of information describing all the open windows, and the list is sortable by clicking a column header. You can multi-select in the list and click 'Close Window(s)' to close multiple windows at once.

Idea: If we add a "Time Opened" column that lists time stamps of when the windows were first opened, it would be easy to sort by that column, then close all the windows that were opened during a span of time, i.e. while debugging. 

While we're at it, there are several other usability enhancements that could be made to this dialog that seem to be low-hanging fruit:

• Make the window a non-modal floater, with the list dynamically updating as windows open and close.
• Add a 'Minimize Window(s)' button.
• Give useful key navigation to the 'Close Window(s)' button (and any other buttons we may add).

I know there are other ideas about making debugging easier (don't show panels, etc.). I'm scoping this idea to improvements we can make specifically to the All Windows dialog to make debugging easier.

After placing a new graph, we might want to go to the plot properties dialog and change the color, label, etc. of the plots we want.

Bzzzt. No go! We can only edit plots that have been added in some other way. (by resizing the plot legend, wiring and running once with data representing several plots, etc.)

For comparison, have a look at the cursor tab. Here we can add and remove cursors at will.

My suggestion is to add the ability to add or remove plots on the plots tab properties page of graphs and charts.

It could look like in the image on the left.

The connectors hi(x) & lo(x) on the primitives for "Split Number" & "Join Numbers" do not line up with multi-connector primitives (Index Array, Build Array, Format, Format into String, Scan from String, etc). See below:

After some searching, this ideas was already discussed in the comments of this declined idea. but I think it deserves to stand on its own, so here we go.

We have a nice menu entry "Menu...Edit...Make current values default" that (if nothing is selected) does just that. In 99% of my cases only the controls are important, because all the indicators, while often containing tons of data (graphs, arrays, etc) can be easily re-created from the control values at any time.

So while the control values are useful to be able to run a VI out-of-the-box with reasonable input values, default values for indicators just contribute to VI bloat, increasing the size on disk.

Making indicators default is useful for the rare cases where a forum users want to show what he gets or expects to get, but not in general development. Yes, we can of course select all controls first, but they might be scattered all over the panel and over several tab pages, so that's not a good solution. (We could also request a menu in addition to the "edit...select all" e.g. called "edit...select all controls", but that is probably a different idea.)

In summary, there should be a menu entry that ignores indicators when making values the default.

It should also work if multiple items are selected "Make Selected Control Values Default", in which case it would ignore any selected indicators.