6.3.3 Working with multiple windows

When working with larger projects, it is likely that multiple windows will appear on the desktop. However, only one of these windows will be the active window; all other windows will be inactive.

An inactive window is identified by a grey frame. An inactive window can be made active in one of several ways:

• Using the mouse, activate a window by clicking on it.
• Using the keyboard, pressing F6 will step through all open windows. To activate the previously activated window, Shift-F6 can be used.
• The menu item ”Window—Next” can be used to activate the next window in the list of windows, while Window|Previous will select the previous window.
• If the window has a number in the upper right corner, it can be activated by pressing Alt-<number>.
• Pressing Alt-0 will pop up a dialog with all available windows which allows a quick activation of windows which don’t have a number.

The windows can be ordered and placed on the IDE desktop by zooming and resizing them with the mouse or keyboard. This is a time-consuming task, and particularly difficult with the keyboard. Instead, the menu items ”Window—Tile” and ”Window—Cascade” can be used:

Tile

will divide the whole desktop space evenly between all resizable windows.

Cascade

puts all the windows in a cascaded arrangement.

In very rare cases the screen of the IDE may become mixed up. In this case the whole IDE screen can be refreshed by selecting the menu item ”Window—Refresh display”.