I agree there is no real use for the tape measuring tool. you should be able to see the sizes of a object or selection of objects in a window output. Apart from its ability to scale the model I never use it. It is just as quick to look at the entity window or draw a dimension line.
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Has this feature changed over the years? I totally agree with the OP… I would like the standard tape measure to show the line distance, but then some option for the tape measure to show x,y,z distances. So if I measure between two corners I might see that it is 5 m. But if one of the points has been shifted off the plane that I thought it was on, I’d like to know that. It might be 5 m straight line, but 0.03 m in the z direction. If I want it to be on the same plane, that is the most basic way to tell me it’s been nudged and also shows me I can move it -0.03 in the z direction to stick it in the plane where it is supposed to be.
Yes. There were updates to the Measurement Tool with the 2019.0 release for desktop edition (at least) …
SketchUp Tape Measure Tool
Upgrades to the Tape Measure tool mean less time you’ll spend opening up Entity Info or looking at the Measurements box. Now, you can get the length of edges, area of faces, and coordinates of midpoints and intersections straight from an inference tip.
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You have always been able to read X, Y and Z values separately from Tape Measure by clicking a start point, hover over an end point and cycle axis locks with the arrow keys.
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SketchUp Tape Measure Tool
Upgrades to the Tape Measure tool mean less time you’ll spend opening up Entity Info or looking at the Measurements box. Now, you can get the length of edges, area of faces, and coordinates of midpoints and intersections straight from an inference tip.
I get the impression the Marketing Dept. wrote this fluff before Development tackled the code.
Despite the extra clutter the “upgraded” Tape Measure creates, it still falls short of the Query tool in the amount of information it provides.
Tape Measure
Query Tool
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Geo, the Query Tool is in the Examples or Utilities extension ? (a EW link would be nice for the OP)
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Yes, and it was a part of the SU installer package … until some *** **** pulled it out several versions back.
Utilities Tools
The Utilities submenu contains two tools: Create Face and Query Tool.
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/utilities-tools
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Agree, never understood why the query tool was pulled out of the basic install… it is an integral part of SU and I have it hotkeyed to the “?” … also agree the tape measure changes clutter the screen,all that information is rarely needed and avialable elsewhere if specifically needed…
Finally, I find drawing some temporary edges to check distances and offsets much quicker than mucking around with guides and tape measure tool… Also a good building grid, both plan and elevation, locked on its thier own layers an essential reference…
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How did you manage to map the query tool to the “?”? The closest I can get is “shift+/”
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Dave . RLGL
well the ?/ is one key, technically I hotkey it to the “/” but “query” tool has visually more relationship with the “?” hence hotkeying it to the “?” key
sorry if that was confusing - I am an energy conservationist - I hate extra effort
So similarly in Autocad [which has very good keyboard hotkey tools] I customised our office to use
single letter for most common command
same letter twice for second most common command and
same letter 3 times for the related dialogue box
eg
L = LINE COMMAND
LL = POLYLINE COMMAND
LLL = LAYER DIALOGUE BOX
D = DISTANCE
DD = DIMENSION
DDD = DIMENSION DIALOGUE BOX
etc etc
so instead of searching the keyboard for individual keys my fingers only had to find 1 key for a multiple command options
as most of us know, keyboard shortcuts are still the quickest way of interacting with software
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