Better way to put away windows other than minimizing them?
isend
Sat, 02/05/2022 - 12:33 am
I don't minimize windows, as it will take a long time to reopen the saved experiment with all the minimized window repeating the minimizing procedure one window after another upon reopening/reloading. However, most of my colleagues have the habit of minimizing lots of windows. It not only slows down the file opening substantially, but also stops me from using Application Windows fn key/shortcut on macOS to take a quick glance of all the windows in IgorPro.
Is there a better way to put away temporarily-unused windows that I can suggest my colleagues? Thank you.
How many windows are in a typical experiment you are using? Must be quite a few tens to hundreds if you are waiting a significant time for the experiment to open. Are these windows really all needed? One suggestion I can make is to propose your colleagues to keep only really necessary windows open or split projects into several experimental files (that's what I do often to keep things manageable).
If your problem is that you do not want to wait until all the windows are built then one alternative is to save a window macro and then close the window. This way, windows can be rebuilt whenever needed. However, with window macros you cannot preview the contents until actually building the window, and you probably need an intelligent naming scheme for these macros.
If you are interested, have a look here:
DisplayHelpTopic "Saving a Window as a Recreation Macro"February 5, 2022 at 03:50 am - Permalink
This might not help in your situation but if lots of windows are being generated by a procedure, I find using
Display/HIDE=1/N=$plotNameto be useful to hide each window that is created (using plotName as a way to vary the names). The windows can be displayed in a Layout even if hidden so that you can see what al the graphs show.
February 5, 2022 at 04:39 am - Permalink
Instead of having one window per wave it is also worth considering have just one window with a popup menu or similar where you can scroll through all your waves one at a time.. You can avoid a lot of windows that way.
February 5, 2022 at 06:15 am - Permalink
You may want to explore Adam's package Windows Desktops. https://www.wavemetrics.com/project/ACL_WindowDesktops
February 5, 2022 at 08:43 am - Permalink
The issue with minimized windows making opening experiments slow is only an issue on macOS. IIRC this is due to a bug in the Qt framework that Igor uses. If your colleagues are on Windows, they're probably don't see this as a problem at all.
As an alternative to minimizing windows, you could hide them. If you're using Igor 8 or later you can use the Window Browser (Windows->Window Browser) to see thumbnails of hidden (or minimized) windows and do things like un-hide them or kill them.
You can hide a window instead of killing it by holding the shift key when you click the window's close button in its title bar.
February 6, 2022 at 09:16 am - Permalink