Settings that need faster access

[Doug Park]

If we put in multiple key keystrokes we would probably not limit it to 2. I've seen several very powerful text editors from way back that allowed 1, 2 or more keystrokes to be assigned. There is no reason to require enter except in cases, such as hitting tab to type in numbers, to say you are done. We do this already for entering the distance a mouse moved. While it isn't identical to ACAD, it is very similar in the keystrokes required.

Wendy asked about painter modes. What I was referring to was the layer painter that we have right now for changing layers. It seems like many of the cases mentioned for repeat last command were things like break, make parallel etc. that you want to apply to many different objects by single clicking on them after establishing what you want to do.

All this talk about the ability to more quickly manipulate CAD seems also to be directed toward cleaning up elevations. So it seems to me that if we do more work on making the elevations cleaner and more accurate that is a much greater time savings than trying to shave fractions of a second out of highly repetitive operations.

It has also been my observation that if given a really simple tool that takes 100 clicks to do a task vs. a more complicated tool that takes 10, people will usually use the 100 click option. I've observed numerous times where people could have used group select with a filter turned on to select a bunch of stuff and then in a few strokes change it, but instead select each item 1 at a time and repeat the same editing dozens of times. I'm sure that most of you aren't doing this, but there are some areas that I suspect aren't being used as effectively as they could simply because they aren't well understood or are new.

For example multiple copy was greatly enhanced in X1 yet I rarely see any posts on it's use. I suspect this is due to it's lack of use rather than it being perfect and not requiring any improvement. I have observed on several occasions where a feature was added in one version and then the next version everyone starts talking about it as if it's a new feature. Snapping is another area where there is huge hidden power. Another area is the cases where we have a right click creation or editing behavior that isn't all that obvious.

As these items are learned and become habit you can improve your efficiency, often quite significantly. I would encourage everyone to spend at least an hour a week learning new techniques. That hour invested in learning can pay off very quickly in making you more efficient. For the really creative among you think about how you can do tasks more efficiently than you do now. You might be surprised at what you come up with.

And keep the suggestions coming. Some of these will likely not show up in X2, X3 or even X4, but over time the best ideas will get incorporated as we move forward. We often want to put something in but can't do so easily until the underlying design is changed. Sometimes the underlying design changes take a couple of versions to finish. For example, when I started we wanted to go to a single file. We started work toward this in version 7 and finally got the feature in V10. Please be patient with us as we move forward as some things take more time that we would like.