Quick Drop

Introduction

Quick Drop was introduced in LabVIEW 8.6 as an alternative to using the palettes for dropping objects on the front panel and block diagram. You can press Ctrl-Space to launch the Quick Drop window:

If the front panel is active when you press Ctrl-Space, you will see a list of front panel objects to drop. If the block diagram is active when you press Ctrl-Space, you will see a list of block diagram objects to drop.

Community

The Quick Drop Enthusiasts community page on ni.com provides several resources and discussion threads around Quick Drop. You can visit this community at https://www.ni.com/quickdrop.

Drop Mechanisms

You only need to type enough text in Quick Drop so that the first item in the list is the desired drop object:

At this point, you can drop the item with one of three possible approaches:

1. Press Enter - Pressing Enter while Quick Drop is active will place the top list item on your cursor, which you can then use to drop the object in the desired location.
2. Double-Click List Item - You can double-click the top item in the list, which will place it on your cursor, which you can then use to drop the object in the desired location.
3. Super Quick Drop - Click on the panel or diagram in the location where you want to drop the item. It will be placed wherever you click. This is the fastest, most efficient way to use Quick Drop.

Object Shortcuts

Instead of typing the entire name of a drop obejct, you can use an object shortcut to define a short name (i.e. 2 or 3 characters) for the object. For example, 'cs' for Case Structure, or 'wat' for Wait (ms). LabVIEW ships with many pre-defined object shortcuts for commonly-dropped objects, but you can also configure your own by clicking 'Configure' in Quick Drop and selecting either 'Front Panel' or 'Block Diagram' in the resulting configuration dialog:

As a general rule, you'll want most of your object shortcuts to be typeable with your left hand only. This allows you to keep your left hand on the keyboard and your right hand on the mouse, and with Super Quick Drop (see above), your hands won't need to leave those default positions while dropping objects.

To become more familiar with the object shortcuts that ship with LabVIEW, check out the Falling Shortcuts! game on the Quick Drop Enthusiasts community.

Ctrl-Key Shortcuts

Basic Functionality

While Quick Drop is open, you can press a Ctrl-Key shortcut to perform a variety of helpful editor operations. The full list of installed Ctrl-Key shortcuts can be seen by clicking 'Configure' in Quick Drop and selecting 'Ctrl-Key Shortcuts:

You can change the default mapping of various shortcuts in this dialog. Here are some of the most commonly-used Ctrl-Key shortcuts:

1. Ctrl-D: Create controls and indicators (or constants) for unwired terminals on selected object(s).
2. Ctrl-R: Remove selected object(s) and rewire remaining objects.
3. Ctrl-T: Move control terminal labels to the left and indicator terminal labels to the right.
4. Ctrl-P: Replace selected object(s) with the object specified in Quick Drop.
5. Ctrl-I: Insert the object specified in Quick Drop on the selected wire(s).
6. Ctrl-B: Change the class name (or configured property/method) of the selected object(s).
7. Ctrl-W: Wire selected objects together.
8. Ctrl-K: Assign a text-based icon to the current VI with the text specified in Quick Drop.

Custom Ctrl-Key Shortcut Plugins

The Ctrl-Key Shortcut feature in Quick Drop is plugin-based, which means you can write your own Ctrl-Key shortcuts. See this blog post for more information on writing your own Ctrl-Key shortcuts. The Quick Drop Enthusiasts community maintains a list of community shortcuts here.

Quick Drop Miscellany

• To launch Quick Drop in LabVIEW for MacOS, press Cmd-Shift-Space.
• To launch Quick Drop in LabVIEW on Chinese Windows, press Ctrl-Shift-Space
• You can change the keyboard shortcut for Quick Drop to something other than Ctrl-Space by going to Tools > Options > Menu Shortcuts, selecting View > Quick Drop in the Menu Item list, and pressing a new Ctrl-Key combination.
• By default, Quick Drop uses keyword matching to support inexact string matches. For example, you could type 'Exit', and it would list 'Quit LabVIEW' in the list. This feature is handy, but causes Quick Drop to be slightly less responsive to key presses, as it takes more time to perform keyword matching. To disable this functionality, you can launch Quick Drop, press 'Configure', go to the 'Options' tab, and deslect 'Enable relevancy-based search'. This will cause Quick Drop to only perform simple string matches to object names, but will also enable faster responsiveness to key presses.