I’m a Rhino/Grasshopper power user who’s developed a repetitive stress injury (RSI) over several years of intense CAD modelling. The single most helpful feature in fighting my RSI has been the “ClickLock” feature in Windows, which replace the “click-hold-drag-release” mouse behavior with a “click-drag-click-release” behavior.
This feature works incredibly well for dragging wires in Grasshopper, but it makes controlling the camera in the Rhino 6 viewport nearly impossible. It seems that turning on ClickLock confuses the program, and that Rhino 6 requires a “click-hold-drag-release” mouse behavior to properly function.
Other 3D programs I work with, such as Blender 2.8, work beautifully with ClickLock enabled. Has anyone found a way to make ClickLock and Rhino/Grasshopper play nicely together, or another workaround for RSI-friendly camera control?
Hi Sam - I never knew this even existed… I’ll see what I can find out - my guess is it has simply never come up before. @sam.whit - as far as I can see in a quick test, the click-lock works in a view manipulation command but does not affect the RMB, only the LMB so does not help in all the standard view orbiting etc that you get from RMB drag… am I looking at the right thing?
Hi Pascal, thanks for jumping on this. Yes, you are understanding my issue precisely. I can use ClickLock for every function that utilizes the LMB drag, but not for the RMB drag.
Hi Sam - and, if I understand , there are applications where the setting affects the RMB, is that right? here, so far, there is no effect at all in Rhino, so the normal RMB behavior still applies, even if it is no help to you at the moment - that is, it is not worse, here, even if not better, but your initial comments imply that it is worse for you…?
Your astute comment led me to some more testing, and it appears that the Windows ClickLock feature only affects the primary mouse button’s behavior. I think my impression of Rhino’s RMB camera function being worse may have been due to a partially faulty RMB on my physcial mouse.
So you’re correct that my initial comment incorrectly gave the impression that Rhino is handling this situation worse than other 3D programs. For example, Microsoft’s 3D Paint program uses a RMB camera control scheme identical to Rhino, and ClickLock does not function there either.
Blender 2.8 has an option to use LMB+hotkey to rotate the viewport camera, which allows it to seamlessly use ClickLock, so that on days that I use Blender, my hand hardly hurts at all.
So, to summarize: including an optional LMB control scheme for rotating the Rhino viewport camera/panning through the Grasshopper canvas would be a beautiful gift to users with repetitive stress injuries!
It may not be ideal, but you could try the RotateView and Pan commands; they both use the left mouse button, and behave by defualt as though ClickLock is on. Setting them up with aliases might speed things up a bit.
EDIT: On closer inspection, it’s possible to fire the RotateView command by simply right clicking; then left clicking will allow you to rotate your view by just moving the mouse - no need to hold a button down. HTH
Thanks for the idea, Mark! I assigned keyboard shortcuts to RotateView and Pan, and it’s quite a good stopgap.
I’d still love to see dedicated RSI-friendly control scheme options for Rhino/Grasshopper made available in the future. Not only does it help folks with RSI, but helps prevent these injuries in the first place. Win-win!
I am using a Wacom tablet for over a decade now with Rhino. I find it much more wrist friendly then a mouse since movements tend to be bigger. On the other hand there are also the more vertical oriented mice that you could try. Switching between devices should also help in reducing the risk of developing (more) RSI.