Mouse Navigate buttons at Edit time

[jimchretz]

Is there a way we could take advantage of those extra mouse buttons while editing code in LabVIEW?

I'm thinking of Undo-Redo perhaps, anyone knows how we can tweak LabVIEW or Windows?

Cheers,

[Sam_Sharp]

If you have a configurable mouse, you can sometimes assign the mouse buttons to different keys (or key combinations) or even record key macros!

[Hooovahh · Accepted solution]

So I haven't fully committed to using it, but I think X-Mouse Button Control can do what you want.

https://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

With it I've been able to setup a rule, that when the application "LabVIEW.exe" is active, to make the middle mouse button simulate pressing CTRL+Space to open quick drop.  The middle click wasn't being used for anything anyway.  I also setup my back and forward buttons to scroll left and right, but I do that so seldom that I think I may try doing something else with it.  You can set it up to to an undo and redo (as long as you perform key press CTRL+Shift+Z for redo) if you think you'd like that.

Honestly the hardest thing for me is to determine what I want these extra functions to do.  Undo redo isn't bad but my left hand is on my home keys most the time anyway, I sorta want it to do things that normally take more effort.

EDIT: Okay another logical one but not very hard to do now, is I mapped my back and forward to CTRL+Mouse Wheel.  What this means is when I'm in a case structure, or event structure, pressing back and forward moves to the next or previous case in a multicase structure.

[jimchretz]

That's very interesting, thanks Hooovahh!

Although I already found a very minor issue with it.

When you're on a "Select the file to open" window, the active program is still labview.exe but that window is technically part of Windows. So the navigate buttons should go to previous/next navigated folder normally.

But in my case I assigned "Ctrl+Z Ctrl+Shift+Z" to those buttons so they do weird stuff if I expect to navigate to folders 😉

[Hooovahh]

You might want to play with it, I think you can setup extra exceptions, or other rules about how to behave when specific windows are active, but good catch.

[Hooovahh]

Okay so I thought I'd share some of my settings just for completeness.  Attached is a zip with three exported configs.  After you import these what it should do is a middle click opens quick drop, and the back and forward buttons will go to the next or previous case in a multi case structure like an event or case structure.

I noticed the behavior you mentioned, where doing something like a File >> Open would cause the back and forward buttons to not work as you'd expect in the explorer window.  So I made the other two settings "First attempt", and "Second attempt" which I think fixes this IF your mouse is in the navigation part of the dialog window.  This isn't perfect but I found myself having my mouse in that part of the window when browsing anyway.  Tested on several versions of LabVIEW, but just on my one machine.