LabVIEW Idea Exchange

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Jason_Harrigan

Use arrow keys for object alignment

Status: New

I find myself with my fingers on the shift and arrow keys a significant amount of time while trying to make my code more readable. Invariable I switch between the arrow keys and the mouse in the process of straitening and aligning. Why not use the arrow keys for both alignment and object movement?

 

I'll let the following illustrations explain what I mean. I'm only showing a limited subset of the possible combinations, most of the time you can go in all 4 directions.

 

Basic

 

 

Note that during a "combo" (the control key isn't released) the original order of the objects will need to be remembered, so that when they are all aligned into a corner, subsequent combinations will maintain the order.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building on that, more advanced functions are below:

 

advanced.gif

 

For the diagonal, once they are aligned to a corner, the diagonal can go in any of the 4 directions.

 

 

As you can see, this will emmensely increase productivity and general neatness of code. And perhaps more importantly, it will bring us even closer to our ultimate goal: making LabVIEW programming even more like playing a video game.

9 Comments
Jason_Harrigan
Member

I'm aware of a few other submissions about alignment hotkeys: here, here, and here. But they don't go as far as this, so aren't duplicates.

Jason_Harrigan
Member

Er, I noticed I forgot to highlight the ctrl key in the advanced demo. The control key should be green during all of the advanced moving functions.

JackDunaway
Trusted Enthusiast

Demo is freaking awesome - and I love the idea! If implemented, this would be one of the Finer Things that makes working with the IDE a pleasure.

TiTou
Trusted Enthusiast

great idea! thumbs up!


We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

Epictetus

Antoine Chalons

yenknip
Active Participant

I would certainly like to see this, but I gave the kudos for the work you put into the images 🙂

_____________________________
- Cheers, Ed
SteenSchmidt
Trusted Enthusiast
There's also one duplicate here: http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Add-keyboard-shortcuts-to-allign-and-distribute-object... Cheers, Steen
CLA, CTA, CLED & LabVIEW Champion
Jason_Harrigan
Member

Thanks Steen, I don't know how I missed that one. Its closer to this one than the ones I listed (but this is still a bit different).

Cisco
Active Participant

Nice idea!

It exits the same kind of shortcut in SCADE environnement (Esterel Technologies).

Very usefull!

Francis M
Edupo
Member

Great idea! I like it. It's so natural to work like this and saves a lot of clicks!

 

As improvement I propose keys ALT/SHIFT + ASDW, because we all work with one hand on the mouse and other in the keyboard.