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When a group of panels/windows are grouped togetther in some way (when docking using drag and drop), you can pin/unpin the whole group instead of individual window, and the same expected behavior should happen as with single window. However, this is not a quick pin/unpin many individual windows, but it's a group, that means a mouse over the icon button will show the whole group, and mouse out the whole group will hide the whole group.
Might be good idea, I don't know. Another way to solve this is to provide minimize/restore buttons also on dividers between windows. That would also allow user to minimize/restore whole gropu of windows, but the drawback is, that user won't see titles of hiiden windows...
Thank you for the comment. That's also a good idea. However, it's another good idea. The reason being that they are not auto-hide (they hide, show on mouse click, but not auto-hide/auto-show on mouse hover over), unless you make your feature also auto-hide (react on mouse hover over).
I'm not really clear about what it means to "show whole group". There should be 1 icon only on the side bar for 3 components? and on button click, all these 3 components show? how?
Just think of it like this (not neccessarily has to be implemented this way): For each dockable area (top, left bottom, right, center, etc.), there would be a placeholder window to be created when there is at least 1 docking child window. This placeholder window is just like any window in a sense that you can drag them around and dock to another place (in this case, it may go away after its children are docked, or stay there, depends on the design, there could be a close button for merge (with the current placeholder window)). Because it's just another window, then can autohide it like anything else. However, remember that its look be different from normal window. Its take can take on the currently focused child for example, or using some other scheme. Your question of "on a single click...", it can be a click, or mouse over, and I much much prefer it can work on both (just like now). Yes, all would show, or hide on this event. How? Well, let the engineer take care of that. This is a user requirement thing. The how go next.
Corrrection: "Its take can take .." -> Its title/text/label can take ...