Interface -Trays need to collapse all at once

[RSquared]

I want to be able to collapse all sub-trays with a tray. For example, Adobe Lightroom for the desktop has a “Solo Mode” in which opening one sub-menu (sub-tray) collapses the others. This saves a great deal of screen space.

[MikeWayzovski]

It is pretty customizable:

Trays in SketchUp

The correct term is subjectively, because objective is not a personal opinion. For your info, this is the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) tray system. Not something Trimble designed. It acts the way that Microsoft designed it to act. It is up to you, the user, to position and size the panels, so that unneeded scroll bars are hidden. The “Default Tray”, was never intended to be the way a user would use it. It is simply a temporary tray with ALL of the panels in it. Microsoft always recommen…

[DanRathbun]

I am never against options to allow users to use the application the way they wish. So a “solo mode” would be helpful to those users who insist on just using a single tray with all (or many) of the inspector panels in it.

So a for the request.

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However, like the post Mike linked to shows, leaving all inspector panels in a single tray defeats the versatility of the tray system. (This was never intended by Microsoft.)

In the image of my tray configuration (in linked post) I chose to group the inpsectors by general type.

Other users do similar but group the panels by frequency of use.
For example their “Properties” tray would be a “Work” tray with Entity Info panel, perhaps Smooth/Soften panel collapsed, and the the Layers panel at the bottom. (This would be the first tray tab and the tray they most often have visible.)
They would likely have a “ScenePages” tray with the Scenes panel and perhaps the Match Photo panel collapsed at the bottom (as it is seldom used.)
The panels in a “Styling” tray (as shown) would be the ones accessed the least.
Then they might even have the Component and Materials browser panels each in their own tray, as these both can have secondary panels. Some users like to have these browser panels in floating trays so they can be on a second display.

So the name of the game is to figure out what works best for your workflows.

[RSquared]

Thank you for the suggestions. They are helpful.

A “Solo Mode” can be helpful when moving from desktop to a the small screen of a laptop laptop for on-site work – or in my case in-workshop.

Thanks again.