The palette edge is the docking anchor. Once snapped together, you can drag all of them at once, provided you grab the palette at top left. The ability to anchor dockable windows is one of the best new features in AutoCAD. In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a proliferation of dockable windows in recent AutoCAD releases. These include the following: a Advanced Settings Dialog Command Line, Dashboard, dbConnect Manager, Design Center, External References, Info Palette, Lights In Model, Materials, Markup Set Manager, Properties, Quick Calculator, Sheet Set Manager, Sun Properties, Tool Palettes, Visual Style Manager. With all these dockable windows competing for space on screen, there is now officially no room left for drawing. Autodesk probably figured that it couldn’t just tell everyone to go out and buy three more monitors, so it invented the anchor feature. Right-click the vertical title bar of any palette (or, more correctly, dockable window), and toggle on Allow Docking, if it’s not already on. Repeat, and choose Anchor Left or Anchor Right. The best thing about anchoring is that you can anchor multiple dockable windows on each side of the screen without sacrificing any more pixels. Hover the mouse over any labeled anchored dock, and the associated palettes expand, filling all the available space. Anchoring is the most efficient way to work with dockable windows. Try anchoring as many palettes on the edges of the screen as your display resolution allows. You’ll have instant access to most of the UI without having to hunt for palettes in the menu or, worse yet, try to remember shortcut keys.
