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## Locking tools

In addition to locking visualization windows together with respect to the view and time, you can also lock their tools. This capability can be useful when exploring data that often requires the use of an operator whose attributes can be set interactively using a tool since the same tool can be used to set the operator attributes for operators in more than one visualization window. To lock a visualization window's tools, select the Lock->Tools option from the Main Window's Window menu.

Consider the following scenario: you have two related 3D databases and you want to examine the same slice plane for each database and you want each database to be plotted in a separate visualization window. You can set up separate visualization windows and slice the plots from each database independently but locking tools is easier and requires much less setup.

Start off by opening the first 3D database and create the desired plots from it. If you want to maintain a 3D view of the plots, you can clone the visualization window to get a new window with the same plots or you can apply a Slice operator to the plots. Apply a Slice operator but make sure the slice is not projected to 2D and also be sure that its Interactive check box is turned on. Turn on VisIt's plane tool and make sure that tools are locked. Clone the visualization window twice and for each of the new visualization windows, make sure that their Slice operator projects to 2D. There should now be four visualization windows if you opted to keep a 3D view of the data. In the last visualization window, replace the database with another related database that you want to compare to the first database.

Figure 23

Now that you've performed all of the setup steps, you can save a session file so you can get back to this state when you run VisIt next time. Now, in the window that still has a slice in 3D, use the plane tool to reposition the slice. Both of the 2D visualization windows should also update so they use the new slice plane attributes calculated by the plane tool. The four visualization windows, arranged in a 2x2 window layout are shown in figure.