Toad - Tips n Tricks - Customize the Schema Browser

Here are some ways in which you can customize and make the Schema Browser in Toad even more useful.

1. Open the Schema Browser by default
   You open up Toad and by default it opens the editor window for you. But what you would like is for Toad to open the Schema Browser as the first window (and maybe the editor window as the second one).
   Toad is probably one of the most configurable software applications that I have seen and provides you with a way to do just that.
   Here is how:
   Go to the Toad Options window. (View -> Toad Options)
   
   In the LHS tree view, scroll right to the end and click on the "Windows" node.
   
   In the details window, you can specify which windows are available and which windows should auto-open.
   
   The other option that is important is the drop-down at the bottom of the pane called "Auto-open bring to front". Setting this to the Schema Browser, make the Schema-Browser the default window that opens up and is ready for use when Toad first starts up.
2. Show all the tabs of the Schema Browser's left pane at once.
   By default Toad shows the Schema Browser's LHS tabs in a single row with scroll buttons. This makes it very hard to quickly jump between tabs that might be far away from each other.
   
   Toad allows you to customize the LHS browser to display all the tabs in many different ways. The one I like the most is the multi-line tab view as it shows all the tabs at once making it easy to jump between them.
    
   To show the multi-line tab view, click on the customize button:
   
   And select the "Tabbed (multi line tabs)" option.
   
   Obviously the sheer number of tabs makes this view a little intimidating to work with. So read on to the next tip.
3. Customize the left pane.
   As you can see, the multi-line tab view is extremely cluttered to make it very useful. Fear not, Toad allows you to customize which tabs are visible. Here is how I have it setup:
   
   To customize which tabs (called objects by Toad) are displayed, click on the customize button and select the "Configure LHS Object Types" option.
   
   The window that pops up allows you to specify which tabs (objects) are visible. It also allows you to quickly go back to the default view.
   
4. Quickly toggle the display of the right pane (details)
   F5 is your friend. Hitting F5 toggles the RHS (details side) on and off. This allows you to get a complete view of all the Schema Browser tabs.
    
   

Other useful tips and tricks for the Schema Browser:

1. F5 - refreshes the contents of the LHS pane.
2. Shift + F5 - refreshes the contents of the RHS (details) pane.
3. You can select multiple objects (in either the LHS or RHS panes) and when you hit CRTL+C, the list of objects are copied to the clip-board as plain text.
4. You can customize how the list is copied to the clip-board (one line per item or items separated by commas) via the Toad Options window (under the Schema Browser options)