Dragging Hairlines to Widen Fields
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This works great for Task Manager to see really long command line paths. You can do it multiple times such that the width of the column can be many times wider than the width of your monitor.
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englebart wrote:
This works great for Task Manager to see really long command line paths. You can do it multiple times such that the width of the column can be many times wider than the width of your monitor.
That's good to know for reference. Making columns wider than my monitor wasn't the part that surprised me, though. The aspect that did was that dragging continued to work even as the mouse pointer went beyond the border of the containing window.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
This is known as "Mouse Capture". Native Windows and dotNET apis are available. Same effect if you press a native command button with a mouse but do not release it. You can roam the mouse all over the place, but if you come back to the button it will depress again. The button captured the mouse. Pretty standard for any dragging operation. That all being said, resizing beyond the borders is not very intuitive. It seems like you are breaking a rule or something.
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This works great for Task Manager to see really long command line paths. You can do it multiple times such that the width of the column can be many times wider than the width of your monitor.
Or you can simply double-click the line to the right of the column header to make that column stretch to fit the longest value. :)
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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This is known as "Mouse Capture". Native Windows and dotNET apis are available. Same effect if you press a native command button with a mouse but do not release it. You can roam the mouse all over the place, but if you come back to the button it will depress again. The button captured the mouse. Pretty standard for any dragging operation. That all being said, resizing beyond the borders is not very intuitive. It seems like you are breaking a rule or something.
englebart wrote:
This is known as "Mouse Capture". Native Windows and dotNET apis are available. That all being said, resizing beyond the borders is not very intuitive. It seems like you are breaking a rule or something.
I know that in principle, although I had forgotten the technical term for it, since I try to stay away from UI design, because it is neither my forte nor fun for me. When possible, I'll leave that to others who are more skilled than am I. In any case, I don't recall noticing other mouse capture events that persisted beyond the border of the window in which they commenced, and I agree that the behaviour is counter-intuitive.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Double-clicking the hairline should be enough :)
That works in many contexts, and I use it frequently, though I can't remember whether I remembered to try it in the Visual Studio/MSBuild macros window.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Double-clicking the hairline should be enough :)
That works in many contexts, and I use it frequently, though I can't remember whether I remembered to try it in the Visual Studio/MSBuild macros window.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
It's something I often forgot to add when using a DGV or listview, but it is a nice feature to have :thumbsup:
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I just discovered, quite by accident, that if you drag the hairline at the right end of the value property of the list box that displays the names and values of the MsBuild macros, the hairline keeps moving to the right even when you drag outside the bounds of the control. Thus, you can keep dragging until it is sufficiently wide to show the end of the property of interest, such as, in my case, $(ProjectDir).
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
Frustratingly I suspect it is limited to a little less that 2147483647 pixels though....
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I just discovered, quite by accident, that if you drag the hairline at the right end of the value property of the list box that displays the names and values of the MsBuild macros, the hairline keeps moving to the right even when you drag outside the bounds of the control. Thus, you can keep dragging until it is sufficiently wide to show the end of the property of interest, such as, in my case, $(ProjectDir).
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
Just wait until your app contains a list view, and you record in the registry the last column sizes. The fun begins when you forget to verify that the registry values actually exist when you retrieve them, and you set your list view column widths to rather large 32-bit random values. Windows is perfectly happy to do it, and tell your drawing code to draw a cell that is 16 pixels tall and 8 parsecs long.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Just wait until your app contains a list view, and you record in the registry the last column sizes. The fun begins when you forget to verify that the registry values actually exist when you retrieve them, and you set your list view column widths to rather large 32-bit random values. Windows is perfectly happy to do it, and tell your drawing code to draw a cell that is 16 pixels tall and 8 parsecs long.
Software Zen:
delete this;Only eight parsecs? ;)
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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Only eight parsecs? ;)
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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Well... It's not the Kessel run!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
Forogar wrote:
Well... It's not the Kessel run
I had to look that one up. I at least had a clue about the size of a parsec. It took a bit of noodling for me to grok that Solo was bragging about covering the distance "in only 12 parsecs." Once I read about them being unable to travel in straight lines, that part made sense, and I suspect the same holds for Warp drive.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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Forogar wrote:
Well... It's not the Kessel run
I had to look that one up. I at least had a clue about the size of a parsec. It took a bit of noodling for me to grok that Solo was bragging about covering the distance "in only 12 parsecs." Once I read about them being unable to travel in straight lines, that part made sense, and I suspect the same holds for Warp drive.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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Only eight parsecs? ;)
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
Okay, so I rounded off a little.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Okay, so I rounded off a little.
Software Zen:
delete this;Au contraire! This little exchange has been both enlightening and fun. Moreover, if you can cover the distance in only 8, you've bested Han Solo by a full third.
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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I just discovered, quite by accident, that if you drag the hairline at the right end of the value property of the list box that displays the names and values of the MsBuild macros, the hairline keeps moving to the right even when you drag outside the bounds of the control. Thus, you can keep dragging until it is sufficiently wide to show the end of the property of interest, such as, in my case, $(ProjectDir).
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
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This has been part of Windows since at least 3.1 (pre-32 bit). I'm not surprised you didn't know about this as I have to constantly teach this trick to my users (and developers).
In general terms, I know that. I've used Windows since almost day 1, and I don't recall ever seeing a drag work when the mouse pointer moves outside the boundaries of the windows that has the focus. That's good to know, so long is it doesn't make the thing 3 parsecs wide. ;)
David A. Gray Delivering Solutions for the Ages, One Problem at a Time Interpreting the Fundamental Principle of Tabular Reporting
