4. Multiple Document Interface¶
All windows (whether editors or views) that are part of the GPS environment are under control of what is commonly called a multiple document interface (MDI for short). This is a common paradigm where related windows are put into a larger window which is itself under control of the system or the windows manager.
By default, no matter how many editors and views you opened, your system still sees only one window (on Windows systems, the task bar shows only one icon). You can organize the GPS windows in whatever way you want, all inside the GPS main window. This section describes the capabilities GPS provides to help you do this.
4.1. Window layout¶
The GPS main window is organized into various areas. The most important distinction is between the central area (which usually occupies the most space) and the side areas (which include the top and bottom areas). Some windows in the GPS area are restricted to either the central or the side areas. You can split each area into smaller areas, as described below. Each area can contain any number of windows, organized into notebooks with tabs, possibly displaying names. Right-clicking on a tab displays a contextual menu providing capabilities showing the Tabs location and Tabs rotation, which allows you to display the tabs on any side of the notebook or make them vertical if you want to save screen space.
The central area can contain the source editors (which can only go there) as well as larger views like browsers. The contents of the central area are preserved when switching perspectives (see below).
4.2. Selecting Windows¶
Only one window is selected in GPS (the active window) at a time. Select a window by clicking on its tab, which becomes a different color, or selecting its name in the menu. Or use the Windows view (see The Windows view), which also provides a convenient mechanism for selecting multiple windows at once.
Finally, you can select windows with the omni-search, the search field in the global toolbar. One of the contexts for the search is the list of opened windows. To make things more convenient, you can bind a key shortcut via the menu (the name of the action is ).
Any window whose name contains the specified letter matches the search field.
For example, if you are currently editing the files unit1.adb and
file.adb, pressing t leaves only unit1.adb selectable.
4.3. Closing Windows¶
Wherever a window is displayed, you can close it by clicking the small X icon in its tab or selecting the window by clicking on its tab and selecting the menu.
When you close a window, the focus is set to the window in the same notebook that previously had the focus. If you open an editor as a result of a cross-reference query, close that editor to go back to where you were.
Finally, you can close a window by right-clicking in the associated notebook tab (if the tabs are visible) and selecting Close in the contextual menu.
There is a menu in the notebook tab when you are in an editor, which closes most windows except a single editor, the one you are using.
4.4. Splitting Windows¶
You can split windows horizontally and vertically in any combination. To do this requires at least two windows (for example text editors or browsers) present in a given notebook. Select either the or menus to split the selected window. In the left (respectively, top) pane, the currently selected window is put on its own. The rest of the previously superimposed windows are put in the right (respectively, bottom) pane. You can further split these remaining windows to achieve any desired layout.
You can resize any split windows by dragging the handles that separate them.
You may want to bind the key shortcuts to the and menus using the key manager. If you want to achieve an effect similar to standard Emacs behavior (where control-x 2 splits a window horizontally and control-x 3 splits a window vertically), use the key manager (see The Key Shortcuts Editor).
Moving Windows shows how to split windows using drag-and-drop, which is the fastest way.
You can put several editors or browsers in the same area. In that case, they are grouped together in a notebook; select any of them by clicking on the corresponding tab. If there are many windows, two small arrows appear on the right of the tabs. Click these arrows to show the remaining tabs.
GPS changes the color and size of the title (name) of a window in the notebook tab to indicate that the window content has been updated but the window is not visible. This commonly occurs when new messages have been written in the Messages or Console views.
4.5. Floating Windows¶
You may prefer to have several top-level windows under direct control of your system’s window manager. For example, you want to benefit from some options your system might provide such as virtual desktops, different window decoration depending on the window’s type, transparent windows, and/or multiple screens.
You can make any window currently embedded in the MDI a floating window by selecting the window and selecting the menu. The window is detached and you can move it anywhere on your screen, even outside GPS’s main window.
There are two ways to put a floating window back under control of GPS. The most general method is to select the window using its title in the menu, and unselect .
The second method assumes you have set the preference Destroy Floats in the menu to false. If so, you can close the floating window by clicking the close button in the title bar; the window is put back in GPS’s main windows. If you want to close the window, you need to click the cross button in its title bar a second time.
GPS provides a mode where all windows are floating and the MDI area in the main window is invisible. You may want to use this if you rely on windows handling facilities supported by your system or window manager that are not available in GPS, for example if you want to have windows on various virtual desktops and your window manager supports this.
This mode is activated through the preference.
4.6. Moving Windows¶
Change the organization of windows at any time by selecting a notebook containing several editors or browsers and selecting one of the entries in the menu.
You can also drag and drop the window within GPS. Select an item to drag by selecting the notebook tab. In that case, you can also reorder the windows within the notebook: select the tab, then start moving left or right to the window’s new position. Your mouse must remain within the tab area or GPS will drop the window into another notebook.
Here are the various places where you can drop a window:
Inside the MDI
While the mouse button is pressed, the target area is highlighted and shows where the window would be put if you release the mouse button. The background color of the highlight indicates whether the window will be preserved or not when changing perspectives (for example, when starting a debug session). You can drag a window to one side of a notebook to split that notebook.
If you drop a window all the way on a side of the area, the window will occupy the full width (or height) of the area.
GPS will however restrict where windows can be placed: editors and most browsers, for instance, must go into the central area (the part that stays common when switching perspectives), whereas other views must stay on the sides (left, right, bottom or top) of that central area. The color of the highlight during a move (blue or brown) will indicate where the window can be dropped.
System window
If you drop a window outside of GPS (for example, on the background of your screen), GPS floats the window.
Keeping the shift key pressed while dropping the window results in a copy operation instead of a simple move, if possible. For example, if you drop an editor, a new view of the same editor is created, resulting in two views: the original one at its initial location and a second at the new location.
If you keep the control key pressed while dropping the window, all the windows in the same notebook are moved, instead of just the one you selected. This is the fastest way to move a group of windows to a new location.
4.7. Perspectives¶
GPS supports the concept of perspectives. These are activity-specific desktops, each with their own set of windows, but sharing some common windows like the editors.
You can switch to a different perspective for different types of activities you want to perform (such as debugging or version control operations). For example, when using the debugger, the default perspective consists of windows containing the call stack, data window, and the debugger console, each at the location you have set. When you start the debugger again, you do not have to reopen these windows.
Each perspective has a name. Switch perspectives by selecting the menu. Create a new perspective by selecting the menu.
The most convenient way to change perspective, though, is to simply click on the button to the right of the main toolbar. By default, it shows the label “Default”, which is the name of the default perspective. Selecting any item in the popup window will switch to that perspective.
GPS sometimes automatically changes perspectives. For example, if you start a debugger, it switches to the perspective called Debug if one exists. When the debugger terminates, you are switched back to the Default perspective, if one exists.
When you leave a perspective, GPS automatically saves its contents (including which windows are opened and their location) so when you return to the same perspective you see the same layout.
When GPS exits, it saves the layout of all perspectives to a file
perspectives6.xml so it can restore them when you restart GPS. This
behavior is controlled by the preference, which you can disable.
One difficulty in working with perspectives is knowing which windows are preserved when you switch to another perspective and which are hidden. To help you determine this, there’s a central area where you can find all preserved windows. It usually only contains editors (including those that you have split side by side). If you drop another window on top or to one side of an editor, that window is preserved when changing perspectives unless it is already in the new perspective. The color of the highlight appearing on the screen while you drag tells you whether the window (if dropped at the current location) will be visible or hidden in other perspectives.