How to stop undocking windows

[EMILY2310672414wj]

I don't know if  it's possible, but it is annoying to attemp to sketch anything in photoshop. I end up accidentaly draging one of my doccuments into a "floating window" and I don't want that. Is there a way to disable floating windows? I want to keep my tabs within the workspace and not in some floating tab on it's own. I can't see anything about this in the community and waned to know if it was possible, if not, is there a way to make it harder to undock a window?

[EMILY2310672414wj]

I don't know if this is where i ask this, but I have no idea where else to ask it

[D Fosse]

Yes, you can disable that in Preferences.

EDIT: oops, that was the other way around. You can disable docking/tabbing, but you can't disable floating. This is probably because floating windows is the original, "native" mode in Photoshop. Tabs came a lot later.

Still, this will only happen if you drag the tab itself, so that's what you need to avoid. If you have enable docking checked, you can easily drag it back into place.

[Conrad_C]

I don’t know of a way to lock down stacked/docked panels to prevent accidentally pulling them apart. So, at least create a workspace of your favorite panel arrangement (Window > Workspace > New Workspace), so that when it’s messed up, you simply select the workspace, and all panels snap back to where you want them.

It’s possible to use Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts to assign a keyboard shortcut to your custom workspace, so restoring your favorite workspace could be as easy as pressing a keyboard shortcut. And that means, if you are drawing on a tablet with shortcut keys on it, you could map one of those to the Photoshop keyboard shortcut. That way, you could restore the workspace by pressing a key on the tablet.

[Trevor.Dennis]

I don't think that works Conrad.  Least ways I have a couple of actions, one that sets and resets my default custom workspace, and the other that sets and resets Essentials.  One is triggered by Function key 5 and the other by F6.  I just tried running both actions several times after undocking several open windows, and they remained floating.  

What would work would be to create an action or assign a shortcut that Consolidates all to Tabs. I was very taken with Michael Ninness Power Shortcuts presentation at MAX 2013.  

He suggests the shortcuts shown in the screenshot for arranging open documents. Actually the Tile All Vertically was my idea as it is something I use a lot.

The thing to remember is that we can save custom shortcuts with custom workspaces, so the shortcuts above only work in my default Triple Monitor workspace.

Shift Ctrl Alt T is the defualt for Free Transform Step & Repeat, and Ctrl Alt V is Vanishing Point.  I can open Vanishing Point from the Filters menu but there is no other way to perform Step & Repeat, so I hit F6 (my shortcut that triggers and Action) to take me to the Essentials workspace which sets all the shortcuts to the defaults.

One last point I like to make when talking about this stuff is the Function keys are wasted IMHO.  The ability to make something happen by pressing a single key is too powerful to leave to the Function key defaults (shown below), which is why I repurpose them.  If you use a notebook or small laptop with limited screen space then they might be useful, but otherwise...  I have maybe used F5 now and again, but I have never used any of the others.

[Conrad_C]

Good catch, Trevor. I wrote the reply without actually testing it, and now that I do, I see the problems with it. Part of what I got wrong is I thought this was about panels, but it’s about document windows. In that case, then yes, Window > Arrange > Consolidate All to Tabs is part of the solution.