Oddly, this wee stroke of genius was forgotten for 40 years until the designers of the daunting B-52 "Stratofortress" applied it to their amazingly monstrous machine - as shown below, note the wheels of the undercarriage are set in a right-deflection position having the nose pointed toward the incoming wind while its undercarriage is aligned with the runway:
And yet again, this wee stroke of genius has been forgotten since, and never applied to another production aircraft much to the chagrin of pilots and seriously frightened passengers everywhere.
Interestingly enough, a similar theme holds true for the Windows controls known as Toolbars. Once upon a time MS created a generic and flexible way for users to add/remove their own objects to toolbars - and x2 adopted this idea. The only problem is that while every other designer in the world realised that the basic nature of the built-in toolbar customising dialog was an extremely painful experience to use...
...seeing it as cramped, with a severely limited view even in "large-icons mode" where no better than 4 items may be seen at a time - they designed their own while Nikos (in his wisdom) decided that a little bit of pain was a good thing, and that x2 users should suffer the indignity of wearing underwear that is many sizes too small, as a sort of character-building exercise in humility (either that or he has a fetish about watching people walk-funny ).
Anyway, I decided to fix this and wrote a very simple utility to not only expand the view-size (automatically taking DPI into account) but also adding a proper Searchbox within the dialog itself which can locate any item as you type by name - no longer are we stuck with just repeatedly hitting one letter over and over hoping to see the item we want appear. When one expands the number of custom-items available in x2's settings, you can easily end up with upwards of 500 items in the menu to choose from, and it was obvious that a better way to instantly get the item you want had to be found.
So, I snapped my fingers, et voilà - x2Toolbar32 was born:
Unfortunately there is no way for me to replace x2's right-click context-menu entry to launch the customisation dialog, so I took another approach - you can just run the programme directly from within x2 (just double-click it as you would any programme), or assign it a toolbar button and/or User-Command by itself. If you only have a single toolbar available then that one is chosen by default, but if you have multiple custom toolbars (I have about 7 of them), you can select the one you want by simply mousing over it in the x2 display and clicking anywhere.
It can handle any number of toolbars, and the searchbox has innumerable keyboard accelerators for quick access - for example, pressing <Ctrl+Enter> will automatically "Add" the found (selected) item into the toolbar (see below for a complete list). If the user wants to move the searchbox under the other column, just click anywhere below it (or use <Ctrl+Tab>) and it toggles/moves accordingly, and can search/remove/relocate items within whichever column you like.
No installation is required, just run the programme from wherever you put it, or (as suggested) make a user-command for it.
Download: x2Toolbar32 Version 0.2.0.4 (Last updated 23-Jun-17)
The credit for the original idea behind this approach goes to the much heralded user Snakebyte (I just took his old 5-line script and added an extra 650 lines to it, because I especially love that kind of overkill. )
Anyway - enjoy!
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Keyboard shortcuts (when the searchbox is in focus):
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<Ctrl+Left/Right> or <Ctrl+Tab> while the searchbox is focused will shift its position under the 1st or 2nd listbox column (clicking with the mouse under either column works too)
<Ctrl+Ins> or <Alt+A> or <NumPlus> or <Ctrl+Enter> or <Alt+Enter> while the searchbox is under the 1st column will "Add" the focused item into the (2nd column) toolbar
<Ctrl+Del> or <Alt+R> or <NumSub> or <Ctrl+Enter> or <Alt+Enter> while the searchbox is under the 2nd column will "Remove" the focused item from the toolbar
<Up> and <Down> in the searchbox will cycle the selection focus of whichever column it's under
<Ctrl+Up/Down> in the 2nd column will "move" the selected item's vertical position accordingly
<Tab> switches the focus back to the main customisation dialog (conversly, <Ctrl+S> switches focus to the searchbar - see /Focus=<Hotkey>)
Multiple command-line switches are available to change the behaviour of the utility if desired (none of these are necessary, they should only be used if you dislike the default settings):
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/Menu shows a popup-menu to select from available toolbars by their labels (otherwise direct mouse-selection of a toolbar is the default behaviour)
/Plain prevents any fancy pyrotechnics (highlighting) and only shows the popup [* Requires /Menu]
/Hidden allows even currently hidden toolbars to appear in the menu (even though they are hidden, they can still be customised - call it a "feature") [* Requires /Menu]
/Colour=0xhhhhhh (Standard prefix + 6-digit RGB hex format) sets the highlightling colour, default is a blue-ish 0x0000CC
/Frame=<Pixels> sets the highlighting framewidth, default is 4 pixels
/Focus=<Hotkey> changes the search-box focus hotkey (in case of conflicts) - for example, the default setting is <Ctrl+S>, defined as /Focus="^s" (only active when dialog is open)
/NoMove stops the mouse automatically moving to the centre of a toolbar on startup or when cycled through using keyboard
/NoFocus prevents focus being given to the Searchbox by default when the dialog opens
/Manual prevents active-searching while user is typing - a search will only occur when <Enter> is pressed (using <Ctrl+Q> within searchbox will toggle active-search)
/Select=<Label> will automatically select/open the toolbar which matches the <Label> text