Docked Pane Grouping & Auto-Hide

MErikReedAugusta — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:50:42 GMT

Currently, we can dock panes to the tops/sides of our workspace. We can also group panes together by docking them to the center of an existing pane—Then they show up as tabs along the bottom of that pane. Lastly, we have a toggleable auto-hide button on docked panes.

I frequently find myself accumulating lots of panes that I'm interacting with fairly frequently. I've also found that they tend to fit into logical groupings of just a few panes each, so I'll group them and dock them.

But then if I toggle auto-hide for a bit to switch tasks or just get more screen real estate for a moment, Pro mostly tosses that grouping in the trash. Once I toggle the auto-hide back off, I'll find that my nice group of 3-4 panes is suddenly a piled mess of panes—and not even all of them.

Near as I can tell, Pro can mostly keep track of 2 separate groups of panes in a single dock location. Anything more than that and it just kinda does what it wants and throws things wherever.

I really don't want to have to keep these panes always visible just to retain the groupings. I feel like that flexibility in screen real estate is why we moved from everything-is-a-toolbar to the pane-and-ribbon layout.

I also am familiar with the Reset Panes button, but it's a little too "scorched earth" for me. These are often panes that I'm frequently switching in/out of throughout a project.

Simply put, if we could group panes together and have those groups persist through toggling auto-hide on/off, that would not only solve this problem, I think it'd open up a world of options for people's workflows.

idea Docked Pane Grouping & Auto-Hide in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Docked Pane Grouping & Auto-Hide