View Menu

The View Menu contains commands that display or hide windows. The commands on the menu are:

• Manage Windows -- Displays a submenu of window-management choices, mostly affecting the currently-selected window. Among the choices are
  • Iconize: Turns the currently selected IDE window into an icon. This may be useful for getting an IDE window out of the way temporarily without actually closing it. See state.
  • Restore: If the selected IDE window is maximized, unmaximizes that window. Otherwise returns an iconized IDE window (if any) to its previous state (normal or maximized). See state.
  • Maximize: Resizes the selected window so that it fills the screen, or to some other area as determined by a track-limits method. See state.
  • Destroy: Closes the selected window. This command calls close to guarantee that the window is closed, whereas File | Close Window calls user-close, where particular user-close methods may instead decide to merely hide the window or do nothing.
  • Bury: Moves the frontmost IDE window to the back. This may be useful for getting a window out of the way without actually closing it.
  • Unbury: Moves the backmost IDE window to the front. This may be useful for retrieving a window shortly after burying it.
  • Show Second: Moves the IDE window that is just behind the frontmost window to the front. The keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-J) is handy for quickly switching back and forth between two IDE windows.
  • Show Third: Moves the third-frontmost IDE window to the front. The keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-K) is handy for quickly switching between three IDE windows.
  • Show Fourth: Moves the fourth-frontmost IDE window to the front. The keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-L) is handy for quickly switching between four IDE windows.
  • Initialize Window Location: Moves and resizes the currently selected IDE tool window to its default position and size. The default position and size are adapted to the current size of the single IDE parent window when the use-ide-parent-window option is true, or to the size of the screen otherwise.
  • Initialize All Window Locations: Moves and resizes all IDE tool windows to their default positions and sizes. This can be used to make the various IDE tool windows fit into a smaller parent IDE window, or to retrieve windows that have gotten shifted out of the interior of the parent window, or simply to tidy up the window arranagement. See also the Shift All Windows Into View item below.
  • Shift All Windows Into View: If any IDE tool windows are partly or totally outside of the IDE parent window (or off the screen if the use-ide-parent-window option is false), then this command will shift them fully into view. If any windows are wider than the the available space, they will also be resized smaller. This is another way to retrieve "lost" windows (in addition to Initialize All Window Locations above, but this method maintains the current window positions and sizes as much as possible, unlike Initialize All Window Locations.
  • Scroll IDE Down: scrolls the entire IDE interior downward by a portion of one page. Scrolling the IDE may be useful for placing various groups of windows in different areas of the scrollable IDE canvas. Using another menu command to select an IDE tool window will also scroll the IDE interior to fully show the selected window. This command and the following three are present only when the use-ide-parent-window option is enabled (as it is by default). They will have an effect only if the ide-page-size option is set to a size that is larger than the IDE interior (which it is not by default).
  • Scroll IDE Up: scrolls the IDE interior upward.
  • Scroll IDE Left: scrolls the IDE interior leftward.
  • Scroll IDE Right: scrolls the IDE interior rightward.

• Project Manager -- Displays the Project Manager dialog.

• Editor -- Displays the Editor workbook.

• Debug Window -- Displays the Debug window.

• Clipboard -- Displays the Clipboard dialog showing the contents of the clipboard.

• Processes -- Displays the Processes dialog.

• Console -- Displays the Console window.

• Package List -- Displays the Package List dialog.

• Window List -- Displays the Window List dialog.

• New Listener -- Opens a listener as an additional pane in the Debug window. The new listener will run in a separate thread, named Listener X where X is a number. You can close the new listener with the File | Close Pane while the listener is the selected window, or by clicking on the close box (the control labelled with an X in the upper right).

• New Editor -- Opens a new editor workbook (a tabbed collection of text-edit buffers). Current editors are unaffected.

• New Inspector -- Opens a new Inspector window, leaving any current Inspector windows in place.

• Extended Toolbar -- Displays the extended (floating) toolbar. See Ide User Guide, chapter 2, section 2.3 for information on how to move items from the extended toolbar to the standard toolbar already on the Project Window.

• Toolbars -- Toggles between displaying and hiding the toolbars on the Project Window. Checked if they are currently displayed.

• Status Bar -- Toggles displaying and hiding the status bar on the Project Window. Command is checked if the status bar is currently visible.

• Background Window -- This command (which will appear only if the use-ide-parent-window configuration option is nil) displays a background window below IDE windows to prevent displays from other applications from showing through. Clicking right over the background window displays a menu showing other visible IDE windows and allowing the background window to be maximized (to cover the screen) or unmaximized (just big enough to be a background for windows other than the Project Window). Also on that menu is a Save All command with the same effect as the Save All command on the File menu. On GTK, the background window is always there.

• Maximize IDE -- This command (on GTK only) will maximize the IDE parent window by calling (setf maximize-ide).

Copyright (c) 1998-2015, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
Documentation for Allegro CL version 10.0. The object described on this page has been modified in the 10.0 release; see the Release Notes.
Created 2015.5.21.