I have always been curious about what features of Control Runner our users are really using. I guess each user only uses a subset of the available features (I personally don’t use them all!) because some of them are not useful for his personal needs, but mostly because the user does not know what features are available, or what are they for.

For that reason I plan to present some not so obvious ways of using Control Runner to increase your everyday productivity. I will present them in no particular order. In fact, my intention is to not even plan the series. I am so accustomed to Control Runner after nearly 15 years, that I am using it all the time without even noticing it. So, what I am going to do is to just go ahead and publish a post whenever I notice that I am using Control Runner to help me in my everyday work.

The feature of today is …

Make any window topmost

Today I have been working on our automatic registration system. This is a complex system that involves a PHP script that calls an executable maintained on our web server to generate automatically the registration keys for our products. The PHP script is called by our e-commerce partner when a client purchases a license for any of our products.

Since we are going to release a new product real soon now, I have had to change the key generation system in order to accommodate the new product.

It didn’t work. At all.

So, I had to do some tests using my local PHP Editor and a browser window. The routine goes as follows; you change a line in the editor, upload to the server (using the editor), turn to the browser, refresh the browser, notice what error is giving this time, return to the editor to try another thing … you get the idea.

When you are faced with a situation like this, it really makes sense to have both windows visible at the same time. Fortunately Windows makes it easy to have two (or more) windows tiled as shown on the following screenshot.

Figure 1 – Using tiled windows

This solution is better than having to switch from one of the windows to the other using ALT+TAB (and much better than using the taskbar icons).

But you can notice that I don’t really need to use the whole width of my screen for the browser, and that all the toolbars it has are really taking too much of my screen real estate.

What I do in these cases is shown on the next screenshot:

Figure 2 – Using a topmost window

I resize one of the windows (let’s call it the secondary window) to the smallest size that makes it easy for me to work with it. And I place it wherever it does less harm (note how I am taking advantage of the white space that exists in my PHP script). When I have it positioned, I press the following key combination: CTRL + ALT + T. That makes the secondary window a topmost window.

What is a topmost window? As it name suggests it is a window that is placed on top of all other windows, including the current window (the one that has input focus). This way I can see the main window and the secondary window at the same time.

You didn’t know of this keyboard combination, did you? Well, it doesn’t work unless you have Control Runner running on your system.

You don’t like the combination? Maybe it has too many keys. Don’t worry, you can change it.

Of course, when you have finished working, you can revert the secondary window to a normal window by hitting again the same key combination.

Do you have a favorite feature?

Please let me know it. I’d love to know how are you using Control Runner.