AX Window Management Tips

It’s pretty easy to get tons of AOT windows open during AX development and sometimes windows will open in weird states (like way way off to the right side of the workspace). There are a few keyboard shortcuts related to window management that are essential to figuring out what’s going on with your windows.

 

Switching between AOT windows

Most people are familiar with the ALT + TAB shortcut to switch between windows. This doesn’t do any good for AX development windows, though, since they are contained within a parent workspace window. A much lesser known shortcut to switching between these developer windows is CTRL + F6. This will cycle through your open development windows. If you hit it one too many times and miss the one you wanted, you can cycle in the opposite order by doing CTRL + SHIFT + F6.

Arranging your AOT windows when they get lost

Sometimes AOT windows will size very weirdly or be positioned way off to the right or bottom of the dev workspace. Other times a window will get positioned so that it’s title bar is above the area of the workspace so you can scroll to, so you won’t be able to move it. To get out of these situations, you can use Windows Menu >> Cascade to arrange all of your open AOT windows so you can see them all. Then you can resize the one you were looking for. The keyboard shortcut for doing this is ALT + W, C (that is, hit ALT + W to open the windows menu, then hit C to execute Cascade).

Un-maximizing a window

Other times you’ll have a maximized window that you don’t want maximized anymore (like if you need to open another AOT to drag+drop between). CTRL + R, the shortcut for Restore, is how you un-maximize your window so you can move it around.

 

Declaring window bankruptcy

Sometimes you just have an unmanageable number of windows open and should do what I call “declaring window bankruptcy” by doing Windows Menu >> Close All. The keyboard shortcut is ALT + W, A. This shortcut also works with application windows if you execute this from an AX 2012 Application Workspace.

Here’s where everything’s at in the Windows menu to recap.

 

Also notice the list of open windows that appear below the “Close All” item. This will show you up to 9 open windows that you can easily switch between by typing the number next to the window name (e.g ALT + W, 2)

That’s it for this post, hope these shortcuts come in handy.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 22, 2013
  This post was just what I was looking for, thank you so much