LabVIEW Idea Exchange
While I have many, one of my major gripes with LabVIEW is that it's very easy to have dozens of open windows. This would normally not be a terrible burden, but LabVIEW has a bad habit of raising ALL open LabVIEW Windows when any single one is given focus.
For example, if I have both the front panel and block diagram windows of 3 VIs, a project window, the VI palettes, and a ctrl+h help window open, then clicking any one brings all 10 windows to the front. This is a problem if, for example, I'm trying to draw an icon based on some source image from Google image search. I am forced to maneuver all LabVIEW windows and the browser window such that the two things I actually want are both visible at the same time.
To get around this, and other difficulties introduced by the huge numbers of windows that labview is fond of creating, I propose this idea based on the relatively recent addition of a "Single Window Mode" to the open source photo editor Gimp (http://www.gimp.org).
In the original Gimp UI, each open image occupies a unique window. Additionally, the toolbox and other dialog windows (layers, brushes, etc.) occupy unique windows as well. This, to me, is remarkably similar to the LabVIEW UI.
In Gimp's Single Window Mode, the toolbox and any open dialogs can be locked to one side of the screen and each open image is in a tab. (Note that this is strongly influenced by Photoshop's UI.)
I would like to see something very similar to this for labview. In this concept, each open VI would occupy a tab (perhaps split vertically into front panel and block diagram) and open dialogs (such as VI palette, ctrl+h help window, navigation window, project explorer, etc.) could be docked to the screen edges. Here is a rendering of such a concept.
I would note that most text IDEs (such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc.) use a very similar paradigm (ie lots of source files open in tabs, project viewer, find+replace, etc locked to screen edges). Clearly more thought would have to be given to how front panels are displayed, e.g. outside of a labview development environment, but I feel that this concept would be a dramatic improvement for the development task.
I was asked to re-open this Idea since LabVIEW NXG has been discontinued, but I'm not doing so because we've already rejected a single-window editor for LabVIEW. Based on our experience implementing this for NXG, we know this would be expensive to implement. That being said, there are other ideas for window management (such as providing a way to "drill down" through a hierarchy while debugging without opening all the panel and diagram windows along the way), and I'm open to new Ideas along these lines. Also, if there are ways that LabVIEW could better utilize OS features like Windows 11 Snap, I'd like to hear those suggestions. Please open new Ideas so that we can discuss them individually.