Window Management

Controller > window management

The main Oxford WordSmith Tools Controller will be at the top left corner of your screen, half the screen width and half the screen height in size. With the exception of Viewer & Aligner, and Concord, the main window for each Tool will appear to the right of it, and the same size. Each Tool main window will come just below any previous ones. Individual windows of results in each Tool will be restricted to that Tool's main window, and can be tiled or cascaded.

Make use of the Taskbar (or Alt-tab, which helps you to switch easily from one window to the next).

"Start another Concord window"?

You will see this if you already have a window of data and press New to start another concordance. You can have any number of windows open for each Tool, each with different data.

minimising, moving and resizing windows

All windows can be stretched or shrunk by putting the mouse cursor at one edge and pulling. They can be moved most easily by grabbing the top bar, where the caption is, and pulling, using the mouse. You can minimise a window: it becomes an icon which you restore by clicking on it. If you maximise it, it will fill the entire screen of the Tool concerned. These are standard Windows functions. It's okay to minimise the main Controller window when using individual Tools.

tile and cascade

All the main Tools show you which windows are active, listed below the item Window in the main menu. The current one will be ticked. To bring another one to the top, just click on the name in the list.

Or to rearrange a number of different windows, you can Tile them (make windows of equal sizes) if there are 5 or less, or else Cascade them vertically below each other. You can also Tile or Cascade the Tools from the main Oxford WordSmith Tools program.

screen clutter

It is easy to get a rather cluttered screen if you have several concordances, each with plot, cluster, collocate and pattern windows opened up. Remember that all these windows depend on their "parent" window, the concordance itself. Likewise, a keywords plot is a "child" of a keywords listing. You can close any of them down at any time, and call them back up as long as the parent window is still open.

If you have a concordance with collocates and patterns open too, I suggest you minimise the concordance window then Tile; this will show the collocates and the patterns while keeping the concordance unobtrusively out of the way.

restore last file

A convenience feature: the last file you saved or retrieved will by default be restored when you re-enter Oxford WordSmith Tools. I've kept it to one only to avoid screen clutter! This feature can be turned off temporarily via a settings option or permanently in wordsmith.ini (in your \wsmith4 folder).