Thanks to Kit Baum, a -vclose- program has
been added to SSC. -vclose- is a small convenience
utility for closing viewer windows from the
command line. Viewer windows most commonly, but
not necessarily, show on-line help for some
command or topic.
An earlier version was posted
on Statalist previously. This version is tweaked
slightly and naturally is now supplied with a help
file.
As I have used it, the most frequent application
is to just to close a bundle of viewer windows
that I have inadvertently left open by a single
. vclose
although other syntaxes are indicated in the
help.
Stata 9 is required. The program is irrelevant
to earlier versions of Stata, which do not
support multiple viewers.
Stata 9 users may install by
. ssc inst vclose
My guess is that StataCorp could make this
particular hack almost instantly obsolete
by one or two changes to the way that the
creation of viewers is handled. One, picking
up an earlier thread started by Fred Wolfe,
would be to allow a preference to be declared
that a new -help- command would _not_ open
a new viewer window if one were previously
open. If this were implemented, then -nonew-
would be a personal default to be overridden
by a -new- option. Naturally there is a user
hack for this, as I indicated in my reply
to Fred Wolfe.
Another would be a way within a viewer window
to close all other viewers.
Nick
[email protected]
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