#8 Undocking and Redocking in and out of Floating Windows
Monday, January 12 2009
Docked windows are great, but are sometimes just a bit too small. They are sometimes holding more information (find results, or stack trace come to mind), than the real estate they’ve been given. You can easily resize the dock panel, but that will replace other real estate that you’re probably also looking at (which is the reason you have the panel docked in the first place). This trick will allow you to quickly change a docked panel, into a floating window (that can easily be moved out of the way [second screen???]), and when you’re done, easily snap that floating window back to the original docked panel location.
Visual Studio Tip / Trick #008 English Transcription:
Today's VSTricks.com trick is a partial video repost from Sara Ford's original trick published on August 6th 2007.
Trick no.8 is double clicking a tool window, Title bar to redock or to restore to the window's last location. So let me just show you, if we double click the Output then that entire window will come back up as a floating window. Now if we double click again it will redock itself.
I found this particularly helpful with Find and Replace, so if you do a Find and Replace and if you have a very large number of items, you can double click that Find and Replace and then resize or make this a bigger window.
Because its actually floating you can drag it all the way off of Visual Studio, but now you can find exactly what you are looking for and double click the title bar. Actually let's say we open one of these items, then double click the title bar and it will restore itself down at the bottom. Now as a side note, one of the things that I catch myself doing which I hate this part of it but if you have this docked window open.
You've not only opened the Find Results you have actually opened the entire tool window. So if you have 5 or 6 or 10 things down here, one of the mistakes I find myself making is using this close window because that will actually close all of the tabs down at the bottom.
Now incidentally that's a feature for our trick if you will because some people don't like that you have to close each one of these items individually. So if I click this X that specifically closing the Error list.
Then I will have to then go back and close the Find and then go back and close the Output. But if you double click to open that in a floating window and then close this, now all of those are actually gone so now if I do a [CTRL]+[ALT]+[O] to bring up my Output, you'll see that that's not in a window. Double click this. It knows where it used to live but my find and maybe my quick watch, or all the other tools that I had docked there are gone. So I kinda have to re-setup my environment.
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