There is a lot of discussion on this forum about what people expect SU to be able to do. It often seems to come down to keeping a balance between the overall simplicity and lightweight nature of SU that we all appreciate and increased functionality. For example, I find the omission of an inbuilt Copy and Mirror command odd because I am so used to it from earlier software I used. Both can be done in SU but not as simply. Other people clearly find it no loss at all.
Is this idea mad? What about having a hot key that results in a pop up palette near the cursor that is user defined. You could have as many or as few icons in a grid and you could set them to inbuilt functions or to extension functions. It’s pretty much the same as most of us already have in the palette along the top of our screens, but that has some disadvantages: it takes up real estate all the time and tends to be far away from where you are working.
You could further enhance it with call outs to keep the main palette modest in size. Like right clicking, the menu/palette would disappear once a command had been invoked.
Copy? Really? CMD V on Mac or Option (ctrl) while moving. I don’t want another button for something I do 100s times a day.
Mirror? TIGs plugin is easy to use and great. Yes, it could be built in. I used my 10s of time on the average workday. Accessible via the context menu, - shortcut, or a little icon / button.
Someone may well tell me that what I have suggested re personalised palette is already possible. If so, I need to learn how to set it up so that it replaces the static palette at the top.
I use my keyboard for shortcuts all the time. If I could do that for Mirror, or especially for Copy, it would be fine. I find having to use additional keys (like Move + Alt to copy) a pain because I have to do it so often. however, I have accepted that I seem to be about the only SU user who feels this way.
Being right handed, I prefer to use the mouse over the keyboard when I can. So having a pop-up palette near where I am working would be ideal.
I need to correct my previous post about ‘flip along’ - it appears that it is a true mirror… but it only mirrors (flips) about the internal component axis. Useless for things like compound roof rafters, bracing, etc - anything that might not have internal axis that align with the real world axis.
Same goes for negative scale - its using the internal axis to control the scale - so when doing something like a roof plane / compound rafter / assembly I would often draw a line and then negative scale.
TIGs mirror plugin is free, and accessible via context menu, shortcut, or graphic button.
Yes, SKP could have this built in, but there is a solution out there.
And the great thing about the plugin is that I can land something precisely where I might want it, instead of copying something, flipping (always picking the wrong axis each time), or negative scaling, and then moving to final position.
Adding to what you say about internal axis against world axis, I’ve found that if I cannot get something to ‘mirror’ (flip along axis) they way I want, then rather than going into a group/component and messing with its axis, I create a temp second copy of the item, group the two together (which assumes the world axis), then I can flip the group and get the expected flip result, then I un-group and delete temp copy.
This all sounds long winded now that I’ve written it out! But in practice it’s quite quick when using keyboard shortcuts !
It is odd that there are different sets of commands for flipping groups to components, but with this method, you flip the temp parent group (of nested groups or components) in the majority of cases.
