Interaction between Ribbon bar and Sidebar pallette?

Rhino Rhino for Mac
1

Hi, just found out I can change ‘themes’. So I added the ribbon bar on top for more flexibility in my work. At school I started learning Rhino for Windows first and the addition of the top ribbon bar really helps making it more intuitive.

However, when I switch tabs, with the first few tabs, everything works fine, but when I get to the ‘Curve Tools’ and beyond, it changes the sidebar on the left along with it.

I imagine this is because the options don’t fit into the ribbon bar and there is more space needed to show all the possible tools?

Could it be a workaround to instead of replacing the sidebar with the standard toolset, to add a double ribbon bar whenever it is needed of the amount of tab-options don’t fit in just one bar?

The reason why I ask this, is that I can of course, workaround by adding a second ribbon bar ‘all the time’ with the standard sidebar tools within reach, however, then I would have that ribbon bar just showing the same tools as the sidebar for most of the time, when I’m not using any of the tabs that change the sidebar. I don’t like to use my screenspace for a bar that mostly shows the same as what’s being shown in another part of my screen.

Is my question clear? Maybe I’m not working in a very functional way, so if there are better ways of dealing with the infrastructure of menu’s within Rhino for Mac, please enlighten me :smile:

Standard sidebar

Transform tab selected, standard sidebar still showing

Curve tools tab selected, sidebar replaced

2

This is normal behavior also on rhino for windows. The idea is when you pick the CurveTools tab, that the tools in the sidebar also show those tools specifically adapted to working with curves. The same happens for Surface and Solid tools.

HTH, --Mitch

3

Correct behavior as far as I can tell.

I’d love to be able to add a custom tab and link a custom palette to it. There’s quite a few tools I use all the time regardless of mode that would be nice to always have available.

Also there seems to be a hard coded limit as to how many tools you can add to a stock palette that will actually show up in the ui. The customize dialog will let you add as many as you want but they don’t all show up, even when you have plenty of screen real estate for them, which greatly decreases the usability of being able to customize an existing palette.

In some cases even all the tools in the factory predefined palettes have already exceeded this apparently maximum display number and they don’t even all show up.

If there was one item I could get on a fix by release wish list the customize issues would be it. Most of the other bugs (white outs, grayed out dimension text and the like, while annoying are fairly infrequent (and hard to reproduce thus making them hard to find and fix), but ultimately you can work around them by saving and relaunching for the most part.

The customize stuff is just a case of unfinished features rather than a true bug as far as I can tell, but has the biggest impact to usability and ease of learning Rhino. The stock Mac theme is a bit overwhelming if you’ve never used rhino before due to the sheer number of icons you’re presented with.

The tabs at least break them up into areas of functionality making it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. If we could just get a user defined tab or two it would make an immense difference, as my guess is everybody’s workflow and most commonly used tools are somewhat specific to the type of work people are doing in Rhino, and would thus allow a lot faster access to the things and one given individual is doing without the dev shaving to guess unsuccessfully what I or anybody else may need to have available.

While the factory tabs are nice and do help quite a bit, they aren’t tremendously customizable due to the inability to add many items to a palette before hitting the invisible limit if as mentioned earlier it hasn’t already been hit.

Removing the limit would help, allowing us to create a tab or two would help greatly. There some tabs I almost never use, and being able to hide those in exchange for a ones I define would make a massive difference in the workflow and speed of operation of the app without having to make nearly so many tab switches just to get at this tool or that tool.

I don’t tend to use the so and line nearly as much because the naming of the commands themselves is somewhat inconsistent, and as such is difficult to memorize, thus the reliance in the icon buttons.

4

I also found another topic on this subject. Strangely this (the one you’re reading now) current topic isn’t showing up in the forum topic list?

5

Very strange. Bumping to see if it appears.

6

To address omarinus’ original question, you can change the theme to custom, thus enabling the grayed out (normally) button to add a second row to the top line of stuff under the tabs and there’s a drop down to pick a palette (either predefined, modified or custom) to go there. However it still suffers Forman arbitrary limit as to how many tool buttons you can put on it (you can add more but they won’t show up, even if there’s plenty of screen real estate to do so), and configuring one from scratch is a bear as you have to look them up one at a time in the lower half and know the exact command name in advance.

This mean you have to find it on another palette someplace, write it down, go back to your one in progress, type it in and drag it up. You can’t drag and drop from other palettes and the dialog at the bottom is miserably slow to type into. It took me a god hour to get one set up. There no way of inserting spacers like you see in a lot of Mac apps with customizable toolbars to break things up into logical groups, scripts and other custom macros will not show up when you’re done even though the dialog will let you create them, they will just vanish when you put it into place and try to use it, and in order to see any changes you’ve made you’ll have to close and reopen your file. Finally there’s no way of putting an actual icon on any from scratch custom items, nor will they show up in the palette when deployed.

In short, it works (sort of), is miserable to set up, and is limited in how many items you can put on it), but it’s better than nothing at all.

7

Thanks for your reply, in my original post I also mention the possibility of using the second custom bar, however, I don’t want too much of my screen being eaten away by such a bar.

I like room for my drawings and compact tool access is a huge plus for me. Rhino is good as it is, but it occurred to me that there might be options that I wasn’t aware of yet. That’s why I opened this topic, sadly no options for me, but it might be something to think about in the future, and am already glad there are people that agree with more options of configurability. However, too much freedom and people might mess-up their workspace.

I have tried my best at getting the toolbars to work for me, but have decided to just use it the way it was originally as it’s too much of a hassle for a half-solution. Of course, I can surely imagine that some users are completely content with the way it is now and it might work for most of the users :smile: