Has anyone found a solution to the moving Altium tool windows problem?

[Psi]

Has anyone found a solution to the issue where altium tool windows jump around and are never on the window you want them on?

by Tool Window I mean the docked things like PCB inspector, projects, messages etc..

Some of these tool windows are used on PCB and on SCH but you can only have one of them docked to one window at a time. 

So if you have two Altium windows, one for your PCB and one for your SCH, you run into the problem that the tool window you want to use is docked to the other Altium window and have to drag it over so you can use it.

There is also the problem where you sometimes double click on something on one screen that causes a tool window to be shown, Altium then moves around all your tool windows to a new configuration and you end up losing track of where things are.

There must be a solution to this, but i'm probably do dumb to find it.

I use Altium 15 at home and the latest version 2x.x at work and they both have the same issue.

[ajb]

Heh, not I, and it's super annoying.  I don't think I've seen it rearrange existing panels when I open a new one though?  Or maybe I have and it's just lost in the noise of how generally annoying Altium is in how it handles those panels. 

If you want to vote it on bugcrunch, for all of the good that does...  https://bugcrunch.live.altium.com/#/bug/11779

(That's a two year old bug with 44 votes about an extremely obnoxious problem with no response from Altium, but a minor annoyance thing I submitted three months ago that got nine votes just got accepted for development  )

[T3sl4co1l]

I don't know what arrangement you're using, but it sounds like you should save your desktop layouts?

Panels are placed in whatever location they were used in last, which may be an entirely new side window/bar if it's not open/in use already.  This sounds like your issue.

Note that Inspector is not the same.  There is SCH Inspector and PCB Inspector, and similarly for List, Query, etc.  Compiler and Messages I think are common, along with the other system ones (Storage, etc.).  You need to adjust both versions to your preferred positions and sizes.

Then save to a desktop layout and link it on the menu for quick access.

It WILL forget the layout when you move around the main window, or change monitors or desktop size, etc.  I think they remember their monitor number, or absolute desktop position, something like that.

Then do it all over again say for a single-screen setup.  I'm fond of docking all the panels as one sidebar, pinned or collapsed as the case may be.  It's a little less efficient, but when I'm mobile, productivity isn't my number one priority.  So, something handy like that is good when you're working on a docked laptop, getting up sometimes for meetings/presentations.  With the two desktop configurations, I can swap between both just fine.

The one thing you can't save, is the position of dialogs.  These are used a bit less since AD18, but it depends if you prefer panels or dialogs for editing things.  Some people use panels as dialogs, for that matter (like the InspectorProperties panel replacing the double-click dialog)...

Tim

[ANTALIFE]

Not sure if same issue, but I find that when you open up a fresh copy of Altium (after say restarting your PC) the positions of your interface will reset when you move the windows around. To solve this I have to set the positions how I want them then exit Altium and start it up again

[T3sl4co1l]

Exactly, window positions are saved on exit.

So if you're in the habit of leaving it open until it crashes, nothing is saved...

Tim

[mc172]

This really tickled me because it's so true:

if you're in the habit of leaving it open until it crashes

 

[Pseudobyte]

I always have made it a point to close it out at the end of the work day. There have been times where I have left it open for days on end, and things start to get (for lack of a better word) weird. The probability of day ruining bugs increases exponentially with time open. I found this was especially true on the worst release of Altium known to board designers  18.x.x

[ajb]

I'm running AD21.6.1.  I haven't changed the number, size, or arrangement of my monitors in a long time.  I almost always close Altium at the end of the workday, and it usually doesn't crash on me these days (although I still get the occasional "Please wait...").  It still rearranges my windows and panels randomly sometimes.  I just fired it up today and the Components panel was docked in the window I had set up for PCB work

Maybe it gets confused if my monitors go to sleep and don't all re-enumerate immediately when they wake up?  Other applications that support multiple windows and/or dockable panels (Visual Studio, Eclipse, AutoCAD...) don't have this problem though. 

Saving a layout is I guess a reasonable workaround (and definitely a useful feature in any case), but shouldn't necessary to prevent it from doing this.  Sometimes I like to rearrange panels anyway depending on what I'm doing, so having to update a saved layout just to make sure it comes back the way I left it is annoying

[PlainName]

Maybe it gets confused if my monitors go to sleep and don't all re-enumerate immediately when they wake up?

I think this might a factor. My setup is reasonably stable but sometimes it goes loopy when waking (from monitor sleep) and you can see the windows re-arrange themselves twice to suit apparently different screen resolutions. I had a 4K Samsung monitor which I had to return because it took so long to come out of sleep that this rearrangement happened any time the monitor was put to sleep and then woken.

What appears to happen is that the secondary monitor comes up first and Windows figures the system is up, checks the resolution for the primary that is alive but not yet responding, and sets it to the resolution of the secondary (or a low-res default - I haven't worked out which, and it may vary), causing the windows to be squeezed up into the top left corner. Then the primary actually arrives and tells Windows the right resolution, so it's all put back as it should be (except that the windows are now not how they were).

[T3sl4co1l]

Could be Windows has a number of configurations saved up and it's cycling through them for some reason, rather than waiting for everything.  I remember this being a thing on.. XP and/or 7, not sure if it's better behaved in 10?  (They're stored somewhere deep in the registry, just a list of things. Pretty safe to deleted old/unused ones I think?)

Tim

[PlainName]

ISTR it does, and when I first hit this issue I went through cleaning stuff up. But that doesn't help if it misidentifies, or fails to identify, a monitor since there will be no proper setting stored. That's the problem, I think.

OTOH, we probably don't realise how useful it is to have this feature! We are used to plugging in any hardware and having it Just Work. stick a monitor on your laptop and you will have a second screen acting quite reasonably, just like that. It's not too surprising that there will be edge cases or things just simply don't mesh sometimes.

[T3sl4co1l]

Yep, part of that being, when you remove a monitor or adjust desktop size, it has to force windows back on screen, else if you remember back in the what, Win98 days or so, windows could go completely off the screen and you'd have no way to get them back (unless you were clever with the keyboard, e.g. ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys; assuming the window had a control menu!).  The desktop configurations should tend to restore positions when switching back, but sometimes it doesn't work, or can't because of how the program's using its windows or something.

Tim

[alexwhittemore]

So if you're in the habit of leaving it open until it crashes, nothing is saved...

In case anyone is unaware: I've gotten in the habit lately of using .DsnWrk files, one per client, to keep all my open projects straight across multiple contexts. They're great for switching between clients, but also for closing Altium and picking up exactly where you left off.