Humble Assessment thus far

Thoughts so far:

I’m sold on Rhino for my design goals. I’m also sold on Mac for my designing machine.

Bringing Rhino to the Mac is a blessing I quite appreciate.

That said, I want to offer some criticism/suggestions that I think would help improve the application interface.

Modifiable aspects of the user interface are found in the preference dialogue, the settings dialogue, the commands customization dialogue as well as the view settings dialogue. Remembering which to call up to make a change is a nuisance. All user customization needs to be accessible through one dialogue interface. That’s not to say a single window, but every supporting window should be in a hierarchical format. Adobe comes to mind in this instance.

Up until the latest version, the commands/menu customization window could be resized narrower. This was very useful laying out menu items on the left side of my workspace as I could narrow the dialogue area to match the 3 across layout I prefer. Now the window can only be widened and the default layout for the menu icons is 5 across. More unnecessary tedium.

Scriptable commands/tasks is a powerful, productivity enhancing feature of Rhino. I can imagine a number of things I’d like to automate, however I’m not a code-writing sort by nature and only study it long enough to get what I need for my design endeavors. As such, I don’t keep in practice of such skills and find later (when I want something else) I’ve forgotten a few critical albeit simple details.

I may be mistaken, but I suspect the majority of people drawn to the design possibilities Rhino opens up are not the same sort that find coding a compelling pastime.

If there was some sort of drag and drop dialogue system to link scripts with menu icons and alias’s I think it would be very welcome.

Update: (Take for instance that I’d programmed the popup menu to a mouse button but now it’s now longer working. I don’t remember how I did it and I’ve only three different dialogues to search through for at least a clue as to how to reconnect it. I’m stopped by something as minor as a drop down menu activation.)
4.
(I spent years using Sketchup as my principle design program, but one of the reasons I’ve lost interest in it is the ongoing need to learn the ins and outs of Ruby, the nonintuitive dispersement of tools, and the inconsistent interfaces of different (User created) tool sets.)

I understand the magnitude of effort it takes to rewrite a program as powerful and comprehensive as Rhino to operate in a different OS. Again, let me note my gratitude for the effort. I offer this in the spirit of mutual accomplishment.

1 Like

some thoughts on your thoughts ; )

Preferences are application wide settings… if i change something there then that change will be affected in every file

Settings (File-> Settings) are file specific… they only apply to the particular .3dm you’re using at the time.

for example. i can have one file with units set to Meters and another with units set to Feet… each one has it’s own individual settings applied.

if things like that were an application Preference instead of a file setting then all files would be either Meters …or Feet.

(many more examples can be shown regarding the differences between a Preference and a Setting… hopefully the units example makes the point though… and if both app Preferences and file Settings were in the same place-- then-- it would get really confusing .



  1. there are other ways to set up rhino… personally i use two icons wide and a floating command dialog.

if you like that, i’ll tell you how to set it up.



  1. macros might be a bit confusing at first but they’re actually pretty easy… there’s no coding or learning of new languages in order to make them… all they do is let you tell which command(s) to run with which options selected…

for example, if you run the Line command, you have these options:

so if you find yourself using the Bisector option a lot, you can make a macro for it by writing:

Line Bisector

…and the alias will take you straight to a bisector line instead of needing to choose the option manually.

if there’s something you do which takes 5 steps and you’d like to automate it, make it a macro… look at your command history of those 5 steps and that’s basically what the macro will be written as.



a major difference between sketchup and rhino is that rhino has so many functions within the application itself… sketchup only includes basic tools and you’re dependent on plugins in order to expand capabilities.

i don’t know, a whole lot of sketchup plugins have been created to mimic the standard toolset in rhino… rhino is far less reliant on plugins… (well, obviously, mac rhino doesn’t have much in the way of plugins but still… )

You’re asking that Rhino for Mac should be made like Rhino for Windows… Heresy ! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Again, drag and drop script loading and alias creation is possible on Windows Rhino, maybe it will make it to Mac Rhino some day.

–Mitch

From a previous discussion:

[quote=“maxz”]
@JKayten

I am using this macro: _ShowToolPalette _ToolPalette=Popup _UnderCursor=YES _Enter in Preferences > Mouse for the MMB. [/quote]

I’m a heretic. :grinning:

Thanks for that Max, I’ll copy the instructions and keep them :smiley: handy

I couldn’t use the middle mouse button effectively so I had to reassign a thumb button on the mouse to the middle click and then set that up in the MMB option in the preferences. I tried finding the mouse button in the list of additional mouse buttons in prefs but nothing would show up as activated when pressed as per the instructions. “Click mouse button to find command field for that button” I wonder if there’s some driver that’s needed to interface with the Logitec Performance Mouse MX.

I would love a setup like you show - more room! Let me know, this is well worth learning.

Some more info here… The dialog illustration is from the old Windows-only times, but the principles are exactly the same. Someone does need to create some more Mac-centric how-to pages here. --Mitch

Yep! I’m all eyes!

so… if you have either the osnaps or command dialog docked(?) in the left side panel then you’ll be limited to the size you can shrink it too.
(and i imagine your problem with being able to do three rows of icons before… but now get a minimal of 4 rows… has to do with the size you’ve set the icons too… if your icons are smaller now then there will be 4 rows instead of 3)…

anyway… if you go Rhinoceros-> Preferences-> Themes
set it like so:

the command dialog will now pop up on an as needed basis (you can move it around and it will remember it’s position).

the icons can be shrunk down to two rows.

you’ll need to use a different method to set osnaps… theres a button on the top toolbar for viewing osnaps.

i personally mostly use the command ToggleOsnapPanelUnderCursor set to a mouse button… when i press the button, the osnap panel pops up under my cursor position then disappears when i move off the panel.

fwiw, this is similar to how the rhino for mac beta was laid out for the first 5 or so years of it’s life :wink:

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Would this work in Rhino for Windows? I know somebody who is looking for this…

Max.

I have this as standard, it’s set in Options>Mouse… --Mitch

I only see 2 commands in Windows that toggle something, one is viewport and toggle render mesh. Doesn’t look good for Windows.

In Windows Rhino, you can popup any toolbar with the macro ! _PopupToolbar "ToolbarName". The toolbar disappears after you click a button. If you want the toolbar to stay out and not disappear, you can use

! _-Toolbar _Toolbar "CollectionName" _Show "Toolbarname" _Yes ! (or No to hide)

and the following will toggle a toolbar:

! _-Toolbar _Toolbar "CollectionName" _Toggle"Toolbarname" !

–Mitch

Thanks Mitch, good to know.

Can you toggle the Osnap panel under curser on windows?

I was just looking for the command like in MacRhino.

Like this?

You set this in Options as above, it’s not a command…

Hmm, rereading this after some much needed coffee, maybe you want the checkbox osnap panel and not the osnap toolbar to pop up under the cursor? In that case, no, it’s not currently possible. All you can currently do is show/hide/toggle visibility with _ShowOsnap.

–Mitch

First, I apologize to the topic starter for hijacking his thread, but I am getting mighty confused here. I could put my question in the Rhino for Windows section, but being a Mac person only I am afraid of getting even more confused by the RfW lingo. So:
My friend uses his MMB to open his custom Popup. He wants to add a new button to that popup, containing a command or macro to bring up a second popup with the Osnaps as a palette of icons.
Hopefully I made myself clear, I am not sure I understand the difference between a Toolbar and a Palette.

Max.

Yeah, cross platform terminology is a b… Palettes in Mac Rhino are pretty much Toolbars in Windows Rhino. They both are collections of buttons that run commands. The Windows Rhino workspace setup currently allows you a little more freedom to customize toolbars and has a lot of drag and drop functionality. To put a new button in a toolbar you can either create a new one from scratch (right click command on the toolbar itself or left click on the little options gearwheel) or you can drag and drop to move or copy a button from somewhere else.

So, for your friend, I guess the best thing would be to do something like this small video

  1. Copy the main Osnap button to the popup toolbar (using Ctrl+LMB drag)
  2. Open the button in the editor (Shift+LMB click)
  3. Change the macro under the button to `PopupToolbar “Object Snap”
  4. Perhaps change the tooltip as well.

You could also start from scratch with a new button in the toolbar (as I briefly showed at the beginning), but I did the button copy thing as a quickie hack to have the Osnap image on the new button.

–Mitch

Thanks Mitch, I’ll send it over to him.

Max.