Comments on: LabVIEW 8.6 Quick Drop is awesome (and an unfair advantage)!

By: Alessandro Ricco

Alessandro Ricco — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:07:56 +0000

Usefull but not completely new… i mean try the search button on the function pallete in LV7.1 you’ll obtain more or less the same behavior of QD except for the shortcut

Ciao

By: Yair

Yair — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:28:05 +0000

Darren, I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but one thing I don’t like about QD is that it only auto completes if the match is exact and for any other case you have to manually select what you want from the listbox.

Example – Let’s say you want to get the file size, but you don’t remember the function name, so you type “fil siz”. Even though there are matches, you can’t just click Enter or outside QD. You have to select one of the results first using the mouse or the arrow keys.

This is often my use case in my own tool and having the tool select the most likely result automatically makes it much easier to use in this scenario. I have a feeling many people who will not want to remember a list of shortcuts would appreciate this behavior.

Another nice feature would be to open the containing palette using Shift+Enter. This is useful if you want to use several functions from the same palette.

By: Jim Kring

Jim Kring — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:14:25 +0000

Susan: I think the block diagram cleanup button is great, but I have a couple issues with it: 1) it’s not written in LabVIEW — it’s written in C (ya, I’m biased). 2) I code cleaner (based on my own standards) than the cleanup tool, so running it on my code actually makes it a little less clean

Darren: You’re very welcome and deserving of the praise! And, thanks for the tip on the “Super Quick Drop” — I’m going to start trying that.

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:53:09 +0000

Thanks for promoting my feature, Jim! Oh, and I guess the Coding Challenge team had a change of heart at some point, because in the NI Week 2008 challenge, we were able to use whatever addons or mods to LabVIEW we wanted…I’m not sure what Robert used (and he was a worthy opponent, by the way), but all I needed was my LabVIEW.ini file, which had all my Quick Drop shortcuts!

One more thing…you mention pressing Enter or clicking an object name in Quick Drop to drop the item…did you know there’s an even faster way? If the object you want is currently auto-completed in the text box, all you need to do is click in the VI, which will dismiss Quick Drop, and drop the object you had selected wherever you clicked…so it skips the whole step of putting the object on your cursor. I like to call this method “Super Quick Drop”, and I’d say it’s what I do about 95% of the time I use Quick Drop.

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:05:03 +0000

One of my favorite LabVIEW 8.6 features is the block diagram cleanup button!