January 23, 2013

Enabling floating form designer in Delphi XE3


Delphi XE3 has an interesting feature removed from previous versions: the floating VCL form designer. You can enable it again easily, at your own risk.

While the IDE is not running, launch the registry editor, locate the key  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\10.0\Form Design and set the "Embedded Designer" to FALSE.

Note: Don't do that if you use FireMonkey. It's form designer doesn't work when floating.

If you need sometimes to have the floating form designer and sometimes not, you way ask the IDE to load his options from another registry key. Use the "-r MyRegKey" in a new shortcut to BDS.EXE. The first time you launch Delphi with that option, the registry key is created with a copy of the current standard key. You can then change the options without affecting the standard registry key. You can also change packages and so on.


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