Once a user has started using BrainVisa and Anatomist a bit intensively, he is likely to end up with many many viewer windows. This generally results into a desktop being a mess. One classical option in Anatomist is to use blocks, grouping several Anatomist views in one large window, but as BrainVisa opens windows itself, working this way is not so obvious in BrainVisa. BrainVisa 4.3 offers tools to help on this.
Moreover, one of the classical uses of BrainVisa + Anatomist is to inspect sets of data, viewing for instance one subject after another, in the same kind of view. Having for each a new window, popping out in any place on the desktop, with default size and settings not suiting the user, is quite annoying. BrainVisa 4.3 can also make this kind of manipulation easier. The solution is in the concept of "reusable windows".
Once a window has been open in Anatomist (either by BrainVisa or manually by the user), BrainVisa brings a new button in Anatomist windows. This button allows to keep existing windows open (BrainVisa viewers will not close them once they are done), and they may be used again by new viewers runs. A reusable window is only reused when it is empty.
Several reusable windows can be setup. BrainVisa will reuse them one after the other, using the first empty one. Reusable windows will keep their settings (position, size, camera orientation, current control, rendering options etc) unless explicitly changed by the viewer. It is thus a convenient way of looking at similar data (for instance white hemisphere meshes) of several subjects one after the other by just switching data displayed in the same view, using a common setup.
Just as for Anatomist windows, windows blocks can also be set into a "reusable" mode. BrainVisa adds a menu in Anatomist blocks for it. Similarly, reusable blocks are not closed by viewers, and viewers requiring a windows block will reuse it. It is possible to set several blocks into reusable mode, but viewers reusing a block will always use the first one since there is no criterion for choosing between several available blocks.
New windows which are not required to open into a block will not add to an existing reusable block, however, but it is naturally possible to set windows in a reusable block into reusable state. This way, the block will not close, neither its reusable windows, and the latter will be reused by standard BrainVisa viewers. Note that non-reusable windows, even when put in a reusable block, will close when they are not used anymore like standard Anatomist views.