Allow Quick Drop shortcut strings to launch plugin VIs

[CMal]

Quick Drop plugin VIs can currently be assigned to Ctrl-Key shortcuts.  This is a great way to quickly invoke the plugins that I use most.  However, it effectively limits the number of available plugins to 26, and it makes it fairly difficult to remember which Ctrl keys correspond to which plugins when there are a lot of custom plugins to choose from.  I would like the option to invoke Quick Drop plugins with multicharacter shortcut strings, the same way I can drop common panel and diagram objects with shortcut strings.  One possible way to do this could be to allow plugins to be included with the other shortcut objects in the Front Panel or Block Diagram shortcuts:

[crossrulz]

Actually, you are not limited to just letters.  I wrote a plugin and I use Ctrl+Space (yes, I hit Ctrl+Space, Ctrl+Space).  I don't see why numbers and other random characters can't be used.

With that said, I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not.  It is kind of hard to remember what the shortcuts are unless you use them.  But if you use them, you will remember what the shortcut is.  I need a little more convincing.

[JackDunaway]

Great idea, not just as a technical limitation mitigation (only 26 or so characters), but also lowering cognition required to invoke the desired action with more memorable descriptors (better, one from a set of descriptors). (e.g., I can only remember ten or so oft-used arbitrarily-mapped shortcuts; therefore, I only use ten or so shortcuts; yet can recall many more function names, or at least a gist of the name, which is sufficient for Quick Drop heuristics)

[Darin.K]

This is not too far from what I have implemented in my QD replacement.  Aside from the fact that I use icons instead of text, the startup workflow I have is as follows:

Ctrl-Space invokes the launcher.

If the Ctrl-Key is held down then the window never launches and keyboard shortcuts can be invoked directly

If the Ctrl-Key is released and there is a current selection then I show a context-sensitive list of plugins that can be invoked.

The shortcuts can be invoked by accelerators which can be assigned manually or automatically.

If there is no selection, or the invoked plugin requires the selection of an object then the QD selection window appears.

I like that I can have the same shortcut mean different things depending on the selection, without having to maintain one monster plugin for each letter.  And as mentioned, who wants to remember them all.

As to this idea, it addresses similar issues, but I am not sure I see the workflow here.  I'll probably prototype first before I decide.

[JackDunaway]

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@Darin.K wrote:

If the Ctrl-Key is held down then the window never launches and keyboard shortcuts can be invoked directly

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That is particularly clever; I can imagine this saves an appreciable amount of time when using QD to invoke plugins versus searching palettes.

[CMal]

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@crossrulz wrote:

Actually, you are not limited to just letters.  I wrote a plugin and I use Ctrl+Space (yes, I hit Ctrl+Space, Ctrl+Space).  I don't see why numbers and other random characters can't be used.

With that said, I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not.  It is kind of hard to remember what the shortcuts are unless you use them.  But if you use them, you will remember what the shortcut is.  I need a little more convincing.

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That's a good point about using non-alphabetical keys for Ctrl-key shortcuts.  It does exand the number of possible shortcuts, but not by a whole bunch.  More importantly, it isn't terribly easy to remember that Ctrl-5 invokes one shortcut, and Ctrl-6 invokes another.  Jack already articulated this pretty well, but for me it is much easier to recall short descriptive names than single character assignments.  Consider a case where I have shortcut VIs called "Replace.vi", "Reset Origin.vi", "Remove and Rewire.vi", and "VI Server Rename.vi".  My first instinct is to use Ctrl-R for each one of these, but since that isn't possible I use P, O, R, and B.  It would be a lot easier if I could invoke these plugins by typing "replace", "reset", "remove", and "rename", respectivley.  The ones I use most often could of course still be invoked with a Ctrl-key shortcut.

As for the workflow, I imagine it would be simple and very similar to how QD already works.  To assign a shortcut to a plugin, type in the diagram shortcut I want to use, then select the plugin from the dropdown. Basically the exact same workflow as with object shortcuts.

[tst]

One problem with this would be if you want the plugin to operate on the search term, but I'm assuming most plugins don't do that and at most the plugin can display its own dialog to ask for the text it wants.

Another problem is that QD needs to know to execute this VI as a plugin (as opposed to dropping it), but I'm assuming that should be easy enough to do.