What surprises me about this discussion is that no-one seems to have looked at CAD programs that actually had / have this feature to see what they do.
Years ago Generic Cadd worked like this natively - when I first stated using rhino (before version 1) I had been using generic cadd , (and its 3D cousin), for some years; having to press ‘enter’ after every command in rhino was frustrating beyond belief.
I believe that it was like that initially in rhino, because that’s how Autocad worked…
Autocad just bought out generic cadd, marketed as an Autocad product , and shortly after killed it - we were offered a discount on ‘upgrading’ to Autocad LT.
It caused a lot of bad feeling and even today I will not have anything to do with Autocad.
I still have many aliases in rhino that are the original generic cadd commands (even though of course I now have to press enter).
Generic cadd was a 2D dos program, and long gone, but there is a windows program descended from it called Visual Cadd, and I just happen to still have it sitting on my windows 11 computer.
How that works is that every command is factory assigned a TWO (and occasionally three) letter shortcut.
Its a windows program, with the normal menu drop downs, so you can use it like that if you want, but once you learn the shortcuts, (which are the same as the original generic ones where possible) its incredibly fast to use.
Alongside each of the menu entries, the shortcut for that command is also clearly noted, so you cant help but learn them.
There is no command line, and its only a 2D program, but its really clean and lean.
Hi @rabbit
I too used generic cad and generic cad 3d they were great programs and yes Rhino never had the ease that they had with their two letter commands. I remember waiting for 3 days for a 2d line drawing to be generated in generic 3d, but in those days barely any software even offered 2d line drawing from a 3dmodel that got rid of the wireframe.
In generic 3d they had two commands I miss a lot in Rhino, their track command which rhino with all it’s bells can whistles still can’t match and it’s 30 years latter and their user assigned track point that works like Rhinos block insertion point but could be assigned to any object and used a special snap function in their snaps.
From generic 2d I also miss that Rhino has no digitizer template which generic 2d also had. One only had to print out the menu and activate it through the software it was really efficient to have all most used commands at pen tip.
I still have both cads installed on a insanely heavy old laptop model that still works. I let my students play with it because you can still do nice things with it using my Sumasketch tablet.
Is there something missing that we need to investigate? It sounds like the new instant aliases cover this functionality, but I obviously could be confused.
So what is your plan for how to actually make that work in Rhino, where you can type an arbitrarily long macro name at any time, there are too many tools for such a cutesy idea to work–having to learn a bunch of arbitrary cryptic shortcuts? what is this, 1987?–and Rhino isn’t just a drawing app but an entire development platform used across wildly different industries? What’s the plan?
I am begging people to do some actual research, the entire premise here that it’s a drag on productivity that you have to type enter or space to execute a command after typing in (just enough letters to disambiguate it) is simply false. It’s not like old Pro/E where every command had at least one entirely pointless “press Enter to continue” step,
That’s how Revit works.
(Not every command is assigned per default, but customization is possible).
It’s kind of nice, but not the peak of all wisdom, imo.
Revit runs out of shortcuts and then you have to start using less and less intuitive shortcut names. You have to set up your shortcuts for different “situations” as well (I don’t think they followed DRY principles when writing that code) which takes hours.
I probably won’t use instant aliases myself but it’s nice to have the best of both worlds.
I wasn’t considering having this automatically happen for Rhino commands. It is already possible to write a script that generates a large list of two letter aliases from Rhino’s command list. The new SDK in Rhino 9 would let you set these aliases as instant.
All I was intending to say is that the idea of “instant’ commands was in fact the whole basis of the command input in some earlier cad programs, which I personally found very agreeable, and which worked extremely well, and made for a very fast workflow.
I don’t ‘have a plan’ for Rhino, that’s not my job or interest, beyond feedback as to how its works in my situation.
Some people seem to have a problem with the whole idea; well if you don’t like it, don’t activate it.
I don’t like the current implementation of ‘layouts’ - (which are a poor idea based on the Autocad ‘paper space’ ) so I don’t use them.
Another poor idea from Autocad is having to press enter to enable a command.
It doesn’t have to be that way; it’s a shame that when rhino was first being developed it adopted that convention (presumably because rhino itself was initially tied into Autocad,) and now for years and years we have been stuck with that baggage.
This WIP feature is thus very welcome. It already works very well.
Thank you.
I’ll use it wherever I can.
