PanelSight 1.4.0: Hotkeys that change every screen at once

PanelSight 1.4.0 brings hotkeys. Press one button on your yoke, your throttle or your keyboard, and every screen in your setup changes at once. This release also adds the Guimbal Cabri G2 helicopter, and the mouse wheel now turns both parts of a double knob.

Hotkeys: one press changes every screen

Think about what you want to see during a flight. Before takeoff, you want the engine display, big, on your second monitor. In the cruise, you want the map there. On the approach, you want the PFD and the radios on your touchscreen. Until now, you had two ways to do that. You could change the layout of each screen, one by one. Or you could use the Instrument Switcher, but then you switched each screen on its own, never all of them together, and its tabs took space on every screen.

Now you press one button, and every screen changes together, in the middle of the flight, with the sim still in front of you. Your instruments keep the whole screen, with no tabs taking space. Set up a hotkey for each part of the flight, and your whole setup follows you from takeoff to landing.

One hotkey works in every aircraft you fly. Hotkeys choose your layouts by name, so if you make a layout called "Approach" in each aircraft, the same button shows it in whichever one you are flying. Under each choice, the hotkey window lists which of your aircraft have a layout with that name.

A hotkey can also give you a monitor back. One press takes PanelSight off that screen, so you can use it for something else, and the next press brings back exactly what was there.

A hotkey is a button on any joystick, yoke, throttle or gamepad, or a key on your keyboard held together with Ctrl, Alt, Shift or the Windows key. For each screen, you choose what a press does:

• Leave as it is: the hotkey doesn't change this screen.
• A layout: one of your own layouts, chosen by its name, and if it has several pages, the page to open.
• PanelSight off on this screen: PanelSight leaves the screen, so you can use it for something else. On your main screen, this hides the panel.
• PanelSight on again, as it was: the screen shows the same layout and page it showed before PanelSight left it.
• Toggle PanelSight on this screen: one press turns PanelSight off on the screen, and the next one turns it on again.

To set one up, open Settings, go to the Screens tab and click Hotkeys…, next to Custom layouts…. Click + New hotkey, then Set key, and press the key or the button you want.

A key you use for a hotkey no longer reaches MSFS. A controller button still does, so pick one that does nothing in the sim.

(Hotkeys are brand new. Tell us how you use them and what you want them to do next, on Discord or at support@panelsight.net.)

The Guimbal Cabri G2

Before, the Cabri G2 got PanelSight's basic panel for piston aircraft, without its own instruments. Now it has its own panel:

• Its glass screens: the engine display and the GTN 650, one above the other.
• Its dials: airspeed, attitude, altimeter, vertical speed, turn coordinator and heading, drawn as they look in this cockpit.
• Its warning lights, its rotor speed lights and its switches, including the rotor clutch switch with its guard, which you open with a tap.
• Its transponder, with its own keys.

The audio panel and the circuit breakers are not there.

This release also adds a new airliner. We will tell you which one soon.

Double knobs and the mouse wheel

Many knobs have two parts: an outer ring and a smaller knob in the middle, such as the knobs that tune the radios on a Garmin. On the panel, the mouse wheel used to turn only the inner knob, so to turn the outer ring you had to click the knob first. Now the wheel turns the part under the pointer. When you rest the pointer on a knob, the part the wheel will turn lights up.

Other fixes

• Airliners: on the Fenix A320, the A330 and the A310, the screens could stay black or frozen after you restarted a flight. They now come back.
• Browser screens: when you switched instruments on one browser screen, the other browser screens could flicker. Now they stay steady, unless one of them shows the same instrument you switched to or from.

Who this is for

• If you fly with more than one screen, a hotkey changes all of them at once.
• If you fly the Cabri G2, it now has its own panel.
• If you use a mouse on the panel, the wheel now turns both parts of a double knob.
• If you fly the Fenix A320, the A330 or the A310, the screens come back after a flight restart.

How to update

PanelSight checks for new versions by itself. When one is out, a notice appears next to the PanelSight icon in the Windows taskbar. Click the notice, then click Update now in Settings. PanelSight downloads the update, installs it and starts again on its own. You can also run the installer from the download page again.

Updating always installs the newest version, which includes everything in this release.

For every change in 1.4.0, see the changelog.