General, Environment, Options Dialog Box

Use this page of the Options dialog box to change default settings for the integrated development environment (IDE). You can access the Options dialog box by selecting Options from the Tools menu and then selecting the General page in the Environment folder.

Settings

Tabbed Documents

Select this option to display document windows that are tabbed together within editors. Tabbed document windows are useful for organizing and switching between multiple open documents.

Note   You must restart the IDE for changes to take effect.

MDI Environment

Choose this option to open documents in a multiple document interface (MDI) environment. MDI document windows are useful for gaining the screen space that is otherwise taken up by the tabs in the tabbed documents environment. When working in MDI mode, you can switch between documents by pressing CTRL + Tab or you can use the tile options located on the Window menu.

Note   You must restart the IDE for changes to take effect.

Window menu contains

Customizes the number of windows that appear in the Windows list of the Windows menu. Type a number between 1 and 24. The default is 10.

Show Status Bar

Displays the status bar. The status bar is located at the bottom of the IDE and displays information about the progress of ongoing operations.

Animate Environment Tools

This control allows you to enable transition effects. Clearing this option causes auto-hidden windows to instantly appear when requested rather than slowly transition onto the screen.

Speed

Controls the speed at which animation effects such as Auto Hide are executed. Experiment with animation speeds to find the setting that best suits you. This option is available only when you select the Animate Environment Tools option.

Enable Autocompletion

Select this to see command completion options as you type commands or file paths. When using auto completion, you do not need to type an entire command or path in most cases. As soon as you type the first character, a list appears containing matching commands that could complete the command you are typing. As you continue typing, the list narrows to reflect only the saved command or path containing the letters you have typed. When you see the desired command or path in the list, you can use either mouse or arrow keys to select it.

Find and Replace

Show message boxes

Choose this option to display the message boxes resulting from a find and replace operation. Two examples of message boxes affected by this option are: "The specified text was not found" and " No more occurrences found in the specified documents." Clear this option to hide all message boxes.

Initialize Find text from editor

Select this option to automatically copy text around the cursor in the editor to the Find what textbox in the Find and Replace dialog boxes. Clearing this option reuses the last search pattern from the previous search in the Find what textbox.