Pallets And Short Cut Menus – Part 1

in an earlier section I showed you how to customize your mouse right click to open a shortcut menu I like to have these turned on because they can give you quick access to often use commands or tools right where you’re working you won’t have to hunt for them or type on the command line to get them there are several different shortcut menus that you can use each one depends on your current activity or situation if you don’t have anything going on meaning you haven’t selected an object nor have you started a command then a right click will get you the default shortcut menu I’ll show you I have some basic shapes here rectangle circle triangle and then a line I have no command started and nothing selected right click right click and a hole because that’s the way i have my settings set up if i did just a right click it repeats my last command so right click hold
and I have my default a shortcut menu with it you can cut copy paste pan zoom move and more you have a lot of
different clipboard functionalities you can isolate objects undo move etc very useful very common operating tools that you have available to you right there right by your mouse so you don’t have to hunt for them you don’t have to type them on the command line you can get to them very quickly and very easily it’s a big time saver now if you have an object that’s selected and you want to get to the edit mode shortcut menu again just right-click
now depending on your functionality is going to depend on what you’re going to be able to do
how you want it to behave if it’s not behaving the way i’m showing you you may want to take a look at it go to your user preferences right click
customizations and turn your shortcut menus on hit apply and close and okay now what you want to do in the edit mode is not hold as I was showing you there I was having trouble with it when you select something and right click and hold it executes a special option that allows you to move copy or paste your object or just canceled that’s a edit mode right click menu option
the way I have everything set at the moment I can select it and then right click now to right click and hold but I right click and now i get my editing shortcut menu I can repeat my command recent input clipboard again isolate or I can erase move copy scale rotate drawing order etc as you can see most of these commands are self-explanatory it’s the command itself I can’t really rotate a circle but I can scale it or it can copy it let’s try that one
I just tell autocad
err I want to put my circles
when I’m finished with the command i press enter or right-click or escape now I can rotate this triangle by selecting it then right click
pick the rotate option
pick my base point of rotation and now my angle of rotation I don’t have to hunt for a command I don’t have to type in anything I can just work that’s where right-click shortcuts come in handy now when a command has been started and you right-click you’ll get the command mode options for example L for line will start something and then we’ll
right-click that works as an inter command
the way my settings are so start my line command again
and hold right click and hold now I can go to enter I can cancel the command recent input these are different coordinates on which I’ve created lines you know or the points to the lines I can use my snap overrides we’ll talk about snap overrides in another section but the snap overrides will snap you right into place they will make sure that you are drawing accurately they will take you to an end point of an object like the vertex or vertice of one of these rectangular or square like corners and will take you to the endpoint of a line etc you can go right to the center of a circle to the quadrant a tangent point to a
perpendicular aspect of an object parallel etc they get you right to the point they are called snaps or I can pan zoom get my steering wheel or the quick calculator up now the command line shortcut menu will be different all the time meaning for different commands it will look different that was the line command let’s start the move command pick my point and right click and hold some of the basics are there like the panning and zooming etc entering cancelling recent input because I’m going from coordinate to coordinate that’s similar but I have different dynamic input I can turn on absolute coordinates or go to a WCS coordinate absolute coordinate means the exact value I’m going five units away from my current point or the WCS which is the world coordinate systems meaning i’m going to an exact coordinate regardless of how far away it is and again I get my snap overrides so you can see the right click command a shortcut menu will vary for different commands because different commands and tools have different needs and functions so that will vary slightly typically right-clicking will give you an appropriate shortcut menu for what you’re currently doing so as you work with AutoCAD and autocad LT and you need to do something with your command or an object or you’re in some situation and you’re not sure what to do right click it could be a real time-saver also it will help you to learn the abilities of the commands that you’re using so I have a saying when in doubt right-click everything in AutoCAD can be customized even the right click function it used to be that the right click was nothing more than an inter command well you still have that option and it’s a great time saving option but you can use either the inter or the shortcut version of the right click there’s even a hybrid version which we went over earlier in another section but will quickly review it again to set this open the options menu by right-clicking with nothing selected and with no command started you can right click or right click and hold depending on how your settings are and go to the options
the user Preferences tab into the right click customization this is how I typically work the default setting is with this turned off and the shortcut menus all turned on and as you can see we have the default mode the edit mode and the command mode each one basically repeats the last command which is the enter key or a shortcut menu now the command mode is slightly different it’s enter shortcut menu which is always enabled or a shortcut menu enabled when a command option is present so in other words it will give you the shortcut menu only when there are options essentially it’s going to be all the time there are very few cases where you won’t be able to have this criteria but what I prefer to do is to use the time sensitive right-click or the hybrid version so that you get the enter key and the shortcut menu functionality in your right clicking you don’t get that option in edit mode so I typically keep it as a shortcut menu when I use the shortcut menu in edit mode I can still have an option for the enter button if that’s what I want to do find the settings that work best for you this is my
recommendation to works best for you apply and clothes and okay

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