I thought it would be nice to have a thread where you can share your custom settings and Aliases. I’ll share mine below.
I primarily use the:
QWERTY
ASDFGH
ZXCVBN
keys to keep everything to the left hand and try to limit main commands to 3 keystrokes or less. I use PopUpPopular to choose which commands should be one key. I find it pretty efficient, but always looking to tweak. Those few seconds tend to add up.
CV → !_Copy_V (copy constrained to vertical direction)
DX → !_DimRotated 0
DY → !_DimRotated 90
EC → !_ExtrudeCrv
ES → !_ExtrudeSrf
LV → !_Line_V
MAF → !_MergeAllCoplanarFaces
MV → !_Move_V
PDO → !_PrintDisplay _State _On _Enter
PO → !_PointsOn
PS !_PlanarSrf
Q → '_Zoom _Selected (This must be a carry over from my Sketchup days???)
SF → !_SplitFace
Some notes:
I got lazy and didn’t post everything. I have a bunch of aliases for zooming that I rarely use. And I left out anything that wasn’t really notable. I can share my INI if anyone wants it.
DX and DY are very useful because they mimic AutoCAD’s default dimension behavior… kind of. Basically it gets you close enough if you can adapt. And I think it follows your CPlane coordinates.
PO - '_paste _zoomselected _move _pause _pause _undoview _pause (for when an object pastes to some random location and you want to immediately move it to where you’re working)
CV - '_clippingplane _vertical _pause _pause enter 0,0,1 (speeds up the clipping plane, I also have one for horizontal)
SD - '_line _pause _pause _slab _sellast (for quickly drawing walls from curves)
MP - -matchproperties _pause _pause enter (speeds up copying properties)
I also have sellast mapped to my third mouse button, which I can’t recommend enough.
My favourite alias is this one (the middle of the path will look different on your PC when you replace it with your own directory). It enables super fast loading of all scripts.
First, to note that BU, BD and BI are internal preloaded aliases for the 3 Boolean operations - no need to create separate aliases for them. OTOH, there is no internal alias for BooleanSplit (which I use the most), so of course I use BS…
It’s about the left hand. It’s an odd workflow but in architecture actually not uncommon to keep the right hand on the mouse at all times and transfer all commands to the left hand to avoid having to move your hand over. Always thought it was ridiculous until I tried it.
As I work in architecture, I use a system adapted from Microstation, which has a category for each left hand key, i.e. Q is for curves (QE polyline, QR Rectangle, QS polycurve etc), W for 3D, D for dimensions and so on. That gives me about 120 shortcuts, most of which I remember, so I very rarely have to type out a whole command.
No shortcut is more than two keys, and most shortcuts are optimized for typing convenience.
Mind you, this is not a 100% rational system, some of it I just made up as I went along.
I find it incredibly useful to have view commands such as hide, show, isolate and invert selection mapped to V_, so that larger models are easy to navigate.