Program Faster Using Quick Drop Shortcuts

[David_L]

Many LabVIEW developers have discovered Quick Drop since the time it came out in LabVIEW 8.6.  For those of you who haven't your life is about to be changed for the better.  Quick Drop is a feature that allows you to very quickly access items from the palettes.  From the block diagram or palette simply press Ctrl-space and then type the name of the item you want.  Once it is highlighted you press enter and the item is ready to drop...

If you want to place the TCP Read function, which is easier? Open Data Communication palette, open Protocols palette, open TCP palette and then find and click on the TCP Read function?

Or to simply type "Ctrl-Space" then "TCP R" and then "Enter"?

Once you get used to this in your workflow you will improve development speed tremendously!

However, this is not even the best part!!!

There is also the Quick Drop Shortcuts feature.  With this feature you can automate any repetitive task you perform in LabVIEW saving you even more time.  For example, if you click on a wire, press Ctrl-space, type the name of any item and press Ctrl-i, LabVIEW will automatically insert whatever was listed in the Quick Drop window.  This is the same as right clicking a wire, finding the "Insert" menu item, then navigating the palettes to find the thing you want to insert, only much much faster!

There are a few QD shortcuts built into LabVIEW such as Insert (Ctrl-I), Replace (Ctrl-P), Remove (Ctrl-R) and Wire All Terminals (Ctrl-D).  However you can also add any new shortcut that does any action you want as long as you can write a VI that uses scripting or any other means necesary to accomplish the task.  I'll go into the details on how to do this in a minute, but for those of you who are less inclined to write a VI, know that there are many custom QD shortcuts already available.  For a list of available community shortcuts, see the document in the Quick Drop Enthusiasts community group.  These include some great new shortcuts such as Align & Compress BD/FP Objects, Reset Origin, Restart LabVIEW, Rewire Error Case Structure and many others.

Creating Your Own shortcut

If you have a repetitive task that you want to create a QD shortcut for, it's a pretty simple process.  The first step is to copy the QD Plugin Template found in "<LabVIEW>\resource\dialog\QuickDrop\QuickDrop Plugin Template.vi to the <LabVIEW>\resource\dialog\QuickDrop\plugins directory and give it a descriptive name.  Then you should open the VI, edit the VI Description to include a description along with a default shortcut.  Finally you need to just edit the VI so that it does what you need it to do.  The template is well documented, so you can refer to the block diagram comments to understand what all the different components are and how to use it. 

So what are your favorite Quck Drop shortcuts?  Share them in the comments below...