there are two main methods of interacting with AutoCAD the mouse and the keyboard many users will use the mouse almost exclusively using the keyboard only when it’s unavoidable however the key to efficiency in AutoCAD is to take advantage of as many tools as you possibly can and that includes the keyboard if you look at the bottom middle of your screen
you will see a grey area one line like this and as you move the mouse over the top of it move your crosshairs it will highlight this is the command line even if you don’t use keyboard input you are going to use the command line AutoCAD will give you instructions on what to do next while using each of your commands and those instructions will be brought to you by the command line in the command line is where you type in your commands in these videos I will often say type on the command line when I say that this is where you would type come down here you can click in it you’ll see your cursor blinking and you will type in a command and as you saw when I started typing it popped up right by the cursor that’s called the dynamic input as I move the cursor around here with my line command it’s asking me to specify the first point of my line it tells me that here on the command line
there is also the icon for it so as I pick my first point now you can see down here in the bottom it says specify next point or undo you can enter in commands there you can get information about your current commands and you can access a lot of other things so not only can you execute commands through the command line but AutoCAD will give you feedback through it so keep that in mind
many commands have options to them those options will appear in the command line so there I just drew my first line to exit out of command press the Enter key or the escape key so that’s to help get it out of your way and you can do a lot of things to the command line you can left-click in these little boxes here or really anywhere but clicking in different places does different things if I click on these little bars here on the left so I click and hold and I drag it put it to where I want now you see these little arrows as I move the cursor to you know the top or the bottom or even to the sides of the command line gives me these little arrows when I move it to the corner it’s at a diagonal now I can stretch my command line making it larger more narrow wider however you want it to be displayed
I can click it and pop it back into place if I want now used to be the command line was always three lines and you couldn’t really change it but you can set it however you’d like by default or out-of-the-box it comes looking like this so if we start something like the circle command let’s start typing in the word circle see it IRC le and you’ll notice I typed it in correctly that’s okay the command line has an autocorrect feature so it gives you some different ideas so if I click on the circle command I can start drawing a circle and remember earlier I said that the command line will give you some instructions what tells you here to specify Center Point for circle or I have these
different options and through these different options I can draw a circle in a different way right now by default the circle command asks you for a center point for your circle just left-click there and drag your mouse out somewhere else and that is giving it a radius or do you want to give it a diameter I can come down to the command line click on the dynamic option and now I’m drawing a circle by diameter so if I click again there is my circle
so now you’ve drawn a line in a circle so your command line gives you a lot of information and it’s interactive if you type it in incorrectly you have things like autocorrect you also have other things like autocomplete so if I start typing and see for circle I get a list here of different options of commands that start with the letter C I can scroll down right here and keep looking I can even go to the command and on some of them get a little pop-up get some information and say oh hey what is that I’m not sure if I press f1 now I’m going to be taken to the help command which will open up help on the circle command so you can get to a lot of different things right from your command line as I start typing it in even more it auto corrects it fills everything back in and it tells me what I want to do now the command line is very intelligent it keeps track of the commands that you use and so if you use certain commands more often then it will start to
automatically fill in those commands ahead of the ones you’d normally don’t use AutoCAD is smart enough to customize itself to
to your needs into the way you use the command line so in the command line some of its really cool features is the autocorrect autocomplete and adaptive suggestions now these are the ones that I was just talking about these are the commands you typically use this start with the letter C so it starts
populating that list with those the command line has a built in synonym list they will return to you a list that might be a synonym of the command so for example if you enter in the word symbol you start typing it in which says insert meaning you want to insert a block or a symbol so if you’re not familiar with all of the exact terminology and jargon that AutoCAD uses you might find this helpful you’ll know when it’s a synonym when it’s in parentheses what you’re typing in is on the left and the actual command AutoCAD believes you’re talking about will be in parentheses another thing you might want to do let’s say that you have two lines and you want this corner here to be round
okay so let’s type in the word round now ro is rotate and round is a synonym for Filat so if i click fill it and i give it a radius distance of let’s say 1 and then i can click on my edges and you can see it makes that little round corner so that’s a nice little thing that you’re probably going to find very useful as you learn autocad other things that you can do with the command line you will see here is by getting your command history if you click on this arrow or if you press the f2 key that will pop up this list and when the list is up here you can select the different items that are in here you right-click and copy it out so if you do some things in AutoCAD that provides you with a list of
information here that you need for a report or for an email you can do that for example if I use the list command to give me information on this line there press Enter that will pop up my command history here and give me information on this line see it tells me it’s aligned what layer it’s on gives me length and angle information so if I need that information about an object I can come in here select it right click and hit copy I can go and paste it somewhere to use later on
that’s really cool you have other options here as well
if I click on this button it brings up a list of the latest commands that I’ve used you can go back to it you can change some of your settings by clicking on this little wrench then you have your input settings right here and you can turn all this stuff off or on you can even change the delay time for when things pop up or not now you can change the lines of prompt history you can even input search options so if I click here I can say what I want to look for so if I want to look for a hatch pattern I can do that if I want to look for a specific block inside my file I can do that and we’ll talk later about what these things are blocks and hatches etc but you can do a search of objects inside your drawing just by typing them in the command line there’s a second form of the command line and I mentioned it earlier it’s called the dynamic input this dynamic input is a visual aid that’s intended to help the drafters efficiency it puts the command line at your crosshairs so that you don’t have to keep moving your eyes from crosshair to the command line and back again this way it will help you to concentrate on what you’re drawing so if I’m drawing on this line I want to keep my focus on this line I don’t want to have to divert my eyes down to the command line and back up again to know what’s going on so the dynamic input can help with it so if you’re a good typist then you can type the word circle without looking at your keys or your fingers and just type it in and see that it’s been typed in
correctly on the command line press ENTER and draw a circle you can turn the dynamic tools off and on by coming down to this little status bar there are a lot of different things that you’re going to see here that we’re going to use this is it right here dynamic input it’s turned on right now and I can tell because it’s blue see these boxes here they’re gray those features are turned off and if I left click on it it turns it off so now when I type in the word line this pops up here on the command line and I get a lot of different things here I get the different commands and I can do searches for them here I can do a search in the help so I can learn more about the dim linear command
or I can do a search here on the
internet for it so you can get right to the internet search if you’re trying to figure out how to use something you can get to it right here it will open up your default browser and show you a different list of things that you can use now here at the bottom are some different settings so if you have a linear brightness setting or a hatched pattern setting you can get to those and if you click on the plus signs it will bring them up as well or click it again to bring it down and you can scroll now a lot of users prefer this way they don’t like the dynamic input because they feel it gets in the way of the drawing another way to enter commands on the command line is through keyboard shortcuts all commands can be executed by typing on the command line but most commands have a keyboard shortcut so for example the circle command you can type out the word circle or you can just type in the letter C that will also start the circle command press Enter or
right-click and draw your circle that saves you a lot of time it also saves you from coming up to the ribbon finding the circle command clicking on it and starting it it’s nice if I’m in let’s say the annotate tab and I’m
dimensioning my drawing and it say oh hey man I needed to draw a circle here well I could stop what I’m doing go back to the Home tab go to the circle and then go back to the annotate tab or I can just stay where I’m at hit the letter C press ENTER and draw my other circle that can help you to work more efficiently so you’re using your mouse and you’re using your keyboard now those little shortcuts there are called command aliases just an alias that you can use for a command now last tip if you press the up and down arrow keys this will toggle you through commands that you’ve entered the up command goes up the list the down command goes down the list so if you want to find very quickly a couple of commands or just go back from one of the last couple of commands you’ve done you can do that very quickly and get to what you want look again if it’s the wrong one press the Escape key and you’re out of there
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