Quick Find Tools By Name

[matto]

There are so many really cool tools in Vectorworks, like the stamp, that i don't use all the time and tend to get burried in a palette somewhere. They are not used enough to have key assignments.

It would be nice if there was a way to quick find tool. say you could type a tool name or part of the name to

find the tool.

[Chris D]

Ah but then you'd have to add it to your workspace to use it...hardly convenient.

It would be nice to have text driven command input.... (I've seen this somewhere before... ) so at least if you know the name of the command, you can call it up easily.

Here's my suggestion:

A button on the toolbar brings up a dialog. This has a text entry box and a scroll list below containing all installed commands. You can type in the command name - but to assist you the scroll list responds to the key input. Pick your command and hit enter. Hovering even tells you what the command does....

[jan15]

Hey Matt, you could just open up the Workspace Editor and look through the alphabetical list of all tools or the alphabetical list of all commands.

[matto]

Jan15

this is what i end up doing half the time, even experimented with a couple of workspace set ups, to keep them simple or task based palettes. No matter how well you organise, digging the structure to find the that useful tool (or even symbols, hatches and textures) that you use one day a month, is still not as good it could maybe be.

Chris D

that's sort of what i was thinking, (well except getting anywhere near the command line :-) )

I was thinking more along the lines search function in apples mail programme. that as you type it adjust the relevance of items.

ie if i type "stamp" in a alpha list it takes you near the items starting with "st..."

but a better search would very quickly get you to

"room stamp, number stamp, date stamp...."

I was starting to think it could be a special mode to the resource browser?

[Chris D]

The more I think about this, the more mad it seems.

Am I right in thinking that if a tool is not in your workspace, you can't access it at all???

What about offices with a standard workspace. Users are effectively barred from the tools not in their workspace...

What is NNA's official way to call up tools not in your workspace??

[jan15]

I think of that as being the whole point of the tool palettes and the pull-down menus -- to be a directory of all the tools and commands, for access to tools and commands I use so seldom that I either haven't assigned a shortcut or else can't remember it.

Every tool and every command is in my workspace, but they're not arranged alphabetically by name. They're arranged in groups that I think of as being related, which makes it easy for me to find them. I only suggested going into the Workspace Editor because it has an alphabetical index, and you seemed to want to look up a tool by name. But if you do that often, and if the alphabetical order works better for you, there's nothing to stop you from making a palette containing all the tools in alphabetical order, and also a pull-down menu containing all the commands in alphabetical order.