I appreciate that someone from sketchup is reaching out on this. It would be ideal if it could somehow be fixed in the next few months, year, something… I don’t know much about the topic other than my own experiences if you’d like me to share I can.
Trying to figure out what I’ve changed lately, but I cant even get 20 minutes of modelling time now and then a bunch of options grey out and become unuseable. its very frustrating, I use sketchup to put food on the table… When it rains it pours I guess…
… @paul.millet I might start trying your suggestions now. Unfortunately I really don’t have the time in my business this month to be doing things like this. Lousy situation this is putting me in.
From the replies to this thread by @Fredo6 and @ene_su describing what causes the problem. Some of the plugins you have installed are eating up your system resources. For SketchUp to be responsible, they should have in place a system that would allow the use of only extensions they have vetted and authorized. End of free plugins.
Personally, as someone who is professionally using the program, I would be happy with this. I think? What are the downsides to that? I think your comment just now is a very interesting topic. What do you think about this @Mark ?
Also, it sounds like you already know more about how plugins are effecting my situation than I do. I’m going to be installing a fresh install running as system admin and purging a lot of plugins I don’t need. Do you have any tips before I start this or detailed knowledge to share?
I should also ask while I’m here. Does anyone know anything about curics plugins and if they make their sketchup file crash? @curic4su it would be great to hear from you instead of continuing to be ignored… When I use curics plugins my sketchup crashes all the time, he has poor customer service so I rarely hear from him. Also tried talking to the community about this topic and no response from anyone… @Anssi should I improve my hardware to get better results and have this crashing or greyed out option happen less? I have 48gb ram, radeon rx 580 graphics card, 8700k cpu coffee lake running at 5ghz. I could use a better graphics, but not sure if I need that at the moment…
Not really. I only read the responses to this thread. From what @Fredo6 wrote, the culprit might be an extension (or several) that create items that show in the right-click contextual menu when you point at something.
Ok thanks.
I do get crashing with DIO 2 - I’m not aware that I’m getting any crashes when using other Curic plugins.
My sense of when I crash, is that what I’m doing with the Trowel tool is manipulating some geometry that is a little complicated. Straightforward use of the tool doesn’t seem to crash SU.
And when it does crash - maybe several times during a modelling session of a number of hours - I’m not much inconvenienced because I have a habit of hitting F1 (my shortcut save key) frequently. The huge benefit I get from using DIO 2 far outweighs the crashing I experience.
Also, because I have a sense of why I think DIO 2 is crashing SU, I’m more conscious of my manipulation of geometry when using it.
I appreciate that this is frustrating for you. There are times when DIO 2 doesn’t crash and reports an error and I always submit the error report. Curic’s customer service is not all poor - e.g. so far for the Pie Menu they have been quite proactive.
I have to say, Tucker, that when I first saw your SU setup that time we Team chatted, I was initially impressed by the massive number of plugin toolbars you had turned on! But then was quickly troubled… can one have too many active plugins and not experience any problems 
and how do you find the tool you need - you must have a great memory 
Thank you for your two cents! I appreciate it. Yea I experience the same thing with DIO tools. Now that I’m doing a big purge and reset, I’ve gotten rid of a handful of plugins I don’t need/will use very often (simplifying my workflow). I use a lot of plugins a lot of time, so yea the memory comes as a result of using a lot of plugins. One thing I’m doing differently now is that most of my plugins essentially are not showing on the screen anymore and isntead in the menu for me to access. Do you or anyone have any tips for this? I don’t know (yet) but I think my sketchup model is loading in way faster now, like within a few seconds instad of 5 minutes, I think this is because I had so many tools locked onto my tool pallette before where as now I have almost nothing except a few primary things out, a reduction of like 80% of my tools are off my pallette now. I heard you can group plugins to turn on and off with sketchucation plugin, I can’t figure out how to do this…
Yea I think one can have too many plugins. I’m happy I had this purge really and I think my sketchup model will load a lot faster from now on. Not sure yet as I don’t exactly know how this all works, I know how to use the plugins though, ha.
If I understand @Anssi’s suggestion, we would limit the installation of extensions to those that have been vetted by our team (and were available in Extension Warehouse). Perhaps this would allow us to discourage developers from adding too many commands to the context menu or using the API that Fredo suggested. Personally, I would love to see more of the extensions go through our review process and end up in Extension Warehouse, so we could improve the discoverability of these tools and also work with developers to improve quality and user experience. But some developers prefer to post extensions primarily on SketchUcation where there is a strong and beneficial discourse dedicate to each of these tools. Being more rigid by requiring Extension Warehouse submittals for extensions to work in SketchUp would probably have a detrimental impact on the community of devs who ‘home-base’ their work out of SketchUcation and contribute ‘free’ extensions for all to use.
I’d prefer for us to take another look at this problem on our end. I’ll follow up with @ChrisFullmer to make sure we have some time allocated to re-investigate this in the near term.
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It was more a dystopia than a suggestion, especially when you look at all the implications. As SketchUp would only be open to validated plugins, even being able to develop and test would require some kind of developer registration and a special “developers’ version” of SketchUp. And it would also mean an end to all those in-house extensions adapted to the workflow of a particular user or firm.
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FWIW, what Fredo referred to he fixed back in 2019. I saw the grayed out menu items prior to that fix. After he made the change, the problem hasn’t been back. If anyone is still seeing it, either they are running an now ancient version of Libfredo6 or there may be another extension responsible for it.
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Or, make SketchUp more tolerant of sub-optimal or abusive extensions.
Yea, that’s what I’m saying. Definitely agree.
Allowing non-signed code to run is also important to keep down the threshold for new users to discover the power of scripting. If you had to first be signed up before being able experiment with the API, I don’t think any of the extension developers I know of would be around.
I think the solution should be a combination of trying to fix SU to not gray out entries and document the bug with UI:Commands and the context menu. Documentation is needed to cover all previous versions, even if the bug is fixed.
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@ArayaCAD
I do use quite a lot of plugins myself and I always try to tidy them up with Sketchucation’s Plugins/Extension manager so I load them only when needed.
I’ve never experienced the problem of greyed-out items though.
It might help to narrow down which plugin causes the problem if you publish all the plugins’ names you use so if we have some in common (sure will be) you can tick them out and concentrate on the rest.
That would be super useful for me, particularly since you’ve never experienced the grey out problem. Jealous about that ha! Are you a mac user? I use windows.
Here are my plugins in alphabetical order starting from z-a since that’s the way the photos are uploading (screenshots of my extension manager list). Would love it if you could share yours, I’ll sift through what you have and see where our differeneces are, would help me a lot to narrow this down…
Thanks for replying to this convo christina!
Give me some time, I’ll try to enable all the stuff I have and work for a couple of hours to see if the problem comes out.
BTW, have you seen Fredo’s new extension, LordOfTheToolbars? I’ve just discovered it, it looks really awesome, helps to maintain the screen tidy.