Automatic tool. Do everyone use it?

[Aitortxo]

Hi all:

Well, now I'm confused... I can't remember in which release started Automatic Tool. I think it was LV6.1... may be too late to post this, but, anyway.

I remember I went to a 4 hour demonstration of the new release, and the very best thing of the release was the Automatic Tool.

I give it a try that day. But didn't make it. I didn't felt it was an improvement, as with TAB and SPACE I knew all the time which tool I was using, and with Automatic Tool I needed to move the mouse slowly, see whick tool LV chosen for me, move again, ok, this is... now... ooops, changed again!!

So the first thing I do in a fresh LV instalation is to set it to be off.

I see some posts that are very confortable with it, and that they really use it.

Please, should I give Automatic Tool another try?

Thanks in advance,

[Darren]

The Auto Tool rocks.  I admit it takes some getting used to.  And I definitely turn off the Auto Tool locking feature in Tools > Options (in case I do need to Tab or Space).  In the rare circumstance where I need some tool behavior that the Auto Tool doesn't readily provide, I just shift-right click to bring up the Tools palettes and just keep going.  Plus, the auto tool seems to get a little smarter with each LabVIEW release.

And just so y'all don't think I'm biased, there are NI people who disagree...one of my teammates, in fact, who is an old-school LabVIEW guy, hates the Auto Tool and has never switched to using it.  But whenever I occasionally need to use an older, pre-autotool version of LabVIEW for whatever reason, I feel totally crippled having to Tab/Space every time I need a new tool.

You should find that after you get used to it, the Auto Tool speeds up your LabVIEW programming tremendously.

-D

Message Edited by Darren on 03-15-2006 05:17 PM

[mfitzsimons]

Absolutely!  Use it 99.9 % of the time.  The only time I go manual is to change text color.

Matt

[tbob]

We may be the only four people in this community who use it.  I love it.  Everyone else I talk to hates it and turns it off.  They like pressing the Tab key.  I hate pressing the Tab key.

[Khalid]

I guess I belong to the old school.  Never liked it. 

-Khalid

[altenbach]

Oh yea!

When the auto tool first came out, it was a bit unpredicatable, but for the last couple of LabVIEW releases it has been stellar. I never turn it off.

[pincpanter]

Automatic tool is great and very time-saving.
Luckily, I started developing with it, so I didn't need to manage the transition, but in any case I would never stop using it.
My suggestion is to try again!

Paolo

[tst]

I think it works great and is almost never wrong. I love it. It does get to be tricky when handling elements which are close together, but that's understandable and it is almost the only case (other than changing colors) where I actually need to change a tool manually.
The trouble is that since this way you almost exclusively need just one hand for programming, I sometimes find myself too lazy to release the second hand from whatever it's doing, so I start doing some select->edit menu->copy->go elsewhere->edit menu->paste action and similar things instead of the ctrl+C->ctrl+V sequence. I usually figure out pretty quickly that it's better to free up the other hand.

[tst]

I also like the way in which it allows you to drop a comment simply by double clicking in an empty space (something that doesn't always seem to work properly in nested structures, at least in 7.0).

[TiTou]

I can't work with that automatic tool... to be perfectly honest I haven't really tried, I am used to the 'tab' and 'space' keys and don't feel I'm loosing time.

I was thinking it is just rubbish but concidering that so many confirmed wire-worker outhere love it, I assume it just requires a short time to get use to it...

De gustibus non est disputandum 😉