Project Browser - How to Keep It Open

[montymay]

Can the Project Browser be kept open during editing? In developing my stack I now find myself constantly opening it from the Menu Bar, because it seems to disappear when I go to my other stacks. There is no keyboard shortcut that I know of. I know that in the Inspector of a stack there is a checkbox that will always keep the stack on top, but I do not know how to find the Inspector for the Project Browser. The opened Project Browser does not seem to be listed in the Application Browser. I cannot find this topic in this forum or the User Guide. Thanks for the answer or any suggestions?

Monty May

[FourthWorld]

Mine stays open until I close it. Do you have any scripts in your stacks or perhaps in plugins you're using which may be closing it?

[montymay]

Thanks for you reply, FourthWorld. I do not believe I have any scripts that close it, but I could be wrong. My IDE (LC 7.0 for WIndows 8.1) shows the following plugins:

goRevNet
revExample
revNavigator
revSmartSave
revTabRuler
Smart Ruler

However, I see that my setting for these is "Chosen from the Plugins Menu," so I presume that they do not start up when LC starts up, and I have never opened them in my work in LC. What LC version do you use? Should I try a different version?

Regards

Monty May

[dunbarx]

Quit LC.
Open a new stack and the Project Browser.
Fool around.

Does it stay open? If it does, uh oh. If it does not, at least we know it is something in the particular application you are using.

Craig Newman

[montymay]

My apologies and thanks to Fourth World and Craig for assisting. It appears that I was mistaken: the Project Browser in my project does not disappear. I thought it did because when I use the Task Switcher (alt+tab), the Project Browser does not appear in the list. I thought it should appear because I thought it was a stack. (I read somewhere that the IDE entities such as the menubar, tool bar, etc., were stacks.) In my project the Project Browser was consistently being hidden by the windows of other programs. If multiple programs are running, the solution appears to be turning on the backdrop to hide all programs but LC.

Monty

[dunbarx]

The Project Browser is a stack. They all are. But glad to hear you have a handle on it.

Craig

[FourthWorld]

...the Project Browser in my project does not disappear. I thought it did because when I use the Task Switcher (alt+tab), the Project Browser does not appear in the list. I thought it should appear because I thought it was a stack. (I read somewhere that the IDE entities such as the menubar, tool bar, etc., were stacks.)

Everything you see in the LiveCode IDE was made with LiveCode; all of its windows are indeed stacks.

But as with other windows in other apps, LiveCode's stack windows have various modes, and only some of those modes will appear in the OS' Task Switcher.

Toplevel stacks will be there, but palette windows in any app will usually not. And IIRC modeless windows won't either.

I believe the Project Browser is opened as modeless, which is useful so unlike a palette other windows can be brought in front of it when needed, but like a palette it's immune to interaction mode changes like the "tool" global property, so you can't accidentally make new controls in it.

Ubuntu and OS X offer a window spread view, in which all the windows within the current work space can be spread out and viewed in thumbnail form so you can get to any of them easily. And by supporting multiple workspaces, it's easy in Ubuntu and OS X to have each app open in its own workspace, and switch workspaces to move between apps rather than fiddling with window layers.

I'm not sure if Windows 10 will introduce either workspaces or window spread, but it would be nice. The rest of the world's been doing it for many years, and it's a productivity godsend.

In the meantime, you seem to have at least figured out what you need for now, and if you're interested I believe there are third-party utilities that can add things like workspaces to Windows.

And of course, being an Ubuntu fanboy I could suggest switching to Ubuntu as a solution for simpler and more flexible window management (along with many other reasons), but I digress.