Creating a new Tag in Entity window

[alangbaker]

I know things change, but when and why did SketchUp remove the ability to create Tags (Layers) in the Entity window?

I used to use that all the time to quickly build my models, and I miss it!

[endlessfix]

It was only ever available on Mac, and was removed in 2021 ? Or there abouts in an effort to “standardize” the UI across the two platforms. It’s unfortunate that the decision was made to limit both platforms to the lower common denominator of removing this very useful option, rather than adding the ability to the windows version to achieve parity.

I have developed workarounds for how I used to use that at this point are faster and an improvement for my workflow so I miss it less now, but it was very handy.

[alangbaker]

Ah… …I didn’t realize that it was never available on Windows.

And reading a little, I can’t see why they didn’t:

1. Add it to Windows
2. Change the interface so it wouldn’t take focus off the Entity name after creating a Layer(/Tag)

[endlessfix]

To deal with this change my new workflow involves a brilliant little ruby script written by another Sage. This simple but effective script adds the functionality to the right click menu to add a tag with the name of the currently selected component and assign that tag to the component.

Create something, make component, give it a name. Immediately after creation the component is still selected, right click and run script option from the context menu. Now you have a tag with that component name and it is assigned. This works well for me, your mileage may vary.

Plugin: Create a Tag per selected component

Here we are: [tbc] Dezmo_tag_by_comp.rbz (10.4 KB) Create Tag/Layer and associate to selected component instances by it’s definition names. There will be no “main” menu but a toolbar icon and context menu. If you select something and it contains one or more components, you will get a context menu (right mouse click) “Add Tag/Layer to selected comps by def name” The toolbar icon will be enabled with a similar manner. Shortcut can be assigned, considering the above mentioned selection criter…

[francisquitof]

I complained about it a couple years ago, 95% of the new tags I created were using the entity info tray when this feature was available.

I had forgotten about it, thank for reminding me, I will add this to the sketchup labs feedback.

[alangbaker]

Thanks!

[colin]

It would be nice if features that only worked on Mac were added to Windows, rather than being disabled on Mac. In the case of creating a tag in Entity Info, there were user cases where the intention was search for an existing tag, and a typo would end up placing the object onto a new tag. If you weren’t paying attention you might not even know the name of the new tag.

So, it was a change that did add a step for most users, but also prevented a bad side effect for a few users.