Prior to Ver.8, the arrow keys were not “reserved” or an issue. In fact, they all still work as shortcuts properly (sans the “right arrow”) which tells us that they are not reserved keys. They are not required for inference and I’ve never used them as such.
If others are having issues with the apostrophe key (feet) as well, the mimicry problem is a valid issue to investigate with other keys. A good way to tell if this is happening is through the Inspector window.
…
This is likely not Trimble’s doing. It seems to be a Mac system thing that is attempting to ensure that the right arrow key is always available. I would bet that if you reassign the down arrow key, the OSX system would remap the “/” key to down arrow. (Same for left vs “;” and up vs “[” keys.)
Meaning that, the SketchUp developers would not themselves choose to remap these keys (apostrophe, etc.) as they are very important to value input in SketchUp.
They are NOW … or rather since SketchUp v 2016.
The development team made the decision, and did not ask the userbase. Likely because the arrow keys are typically reserved for application specific use throughout the software world. (To be blunt,) assigning user accelerators to these kind of keys is asking for this kind of conflicting issue. (Sorry, as a developer I’m on the side of the SketchUp application programmers.)
The “clearing of values” from the VCB is hard-coded to support the RECENT refactoring of the arrow keys to use as inference axis locks. When you click one of these inference locks the value (length) begins building as you move the mouse along the locked axis, … if you change your mind and click on of the other axis inference locks, naturally this clears the old length, in prep for displaying a new length along the newly chosen axis.
You have two options.
(1) Open a Feature Request and wait. Which might be a long one, if it ever gets implemented. (I don’t think that it will. Two users does not a trend make, and the scenario is easily avoided.)
(2) Move back to SketchUp 2015 and live without the web features that no longer work pre-2017, (3D Warehouse, GeoLocation, etc.,) and whatever bugs have been fixed since.
Going forward, … the solution this specific problem is to no longer allow the SketchUp Shortcut window to accept the reassignment of “reserved” keys (and keystroke combinations.)
Though I have never gotten used to not using a mouse on my macbook, some of us, have gotten quit a hang of it @ericschimel ?
And with the modifier keys Ctrl and Cmd you can orbit while clicking on the trackpad
On a conceptual level the arrow keys have always been reserved in SketchUp for the inference engine. This feature is fundamental to SketchUp and available in virtually all tools. Since using a single arrow key as a shortcut was never intended to be done it’s not strange if it changed when rewriting some part of the software. It would be nice though if SketchUp didn’t allow these keys alone to be used as shortcuts and it would never be a problem.
Agree, especially since command key chords are already disallowed on Mac.
SketchUp does let you use the arrow keys for a shortcut, but at least it warns you first that it’s a bad idea:
Just because you’ve been doing it that way for 10 years, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Using the arrow keys to lock inference axis was a good improvement and you should give it a go.
It still looks like a bug that the ’ key activates zoom when you’ve set the shortcut to →. If you choose to not use that key to lock the axis, then that’s the only feature you should lose. You shouldn’t lose the ability to type the ’ for sizes in feet.
That doesn’t seem to be the case. I assigned zoom to all the arrow keys (one at a time) and the → was the only one that was mapped to another key, at least the ones I tried, and I tried all the ones in that area of the keyboard ; ’ \ , . /
Hmmm, okay, but it still is weird. I was thinking that there might be some extra arrow functions for small keyboards that lacked dedicated arrow keys and numeric keypads.
I was able to replicate this issue for SketchUp Pro 2018 - I assigned my right arrow to the zoom command, and then my apostrophe key also magically became a zoom shortcut.
I was also able to confirm that this does not happen in 2017 - assigning the right arrow as zoom didn’t affect the apostrophe key.
I’ll let the product team know about this, but considering that SketchUp was really meant to be navigated with a 3-button mouse (and it’s so incredibly fast once you do), I’m not sure how high a priority fix this would be. Reassigning arrows really isn’t a recommended workflow.
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.