Keyboard Shortcuts IN THE TOOLTIPS

Come the F on, why do you make us look for lists of shortcuts like it’s 1995? Just put them in the tooltips of the icons like smart, friendly developers do.

Hi jlillegard, hi folks.

With SU 2016 on Mac OS, I see the shortcut in brackets when I place the cursor over a tool icon.

For example, with the Rectangle Tool I see Rectangle [R].

If you see nothing, it probably means that there is no shortcut assigned to the tool in question.

BTW, using words like “Come the F on” is not the best way to seek help from others.

Just ideas.

Jean

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Tool keyboard shortcuts are just the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s a handy utility plugin by Jim Foltz that creates a neat printable list of all SU shortcuts.

printkeys.rbz (889 Bytes)

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Yeah I probably shouldn’t make forum posts after a 9 hour shift.

The thing that set this off was moving a simple object in my model freely once, but then having it lock to an axis the next time I tried to move it. If I had known the arrow keys came into play here that would’ve made the positioning lot less frustrating.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by modern game design that can explain contextual controls to an insulting degree, but I’d really like it if application developers took a few cues from them.

Don’t like how this kind of software is still made with manuals and support contracts in mind. Annoying design cruft.

On the contrary, I would actually like SketchUp to have a decent manual, online or offline, like it used to have in old days. “Others don’t have it either” is a lame excuse. That Microsoft ditched the HTML help feature instead of developing it further makes me grit my teeth.

Anssi

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I agree with the OP. Why is there no keyboard shortcut listed in the tooltip? I just want to know their reasoning why. So WHY?

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This is a really good idea actually. It would absolutely decrease the learning curve, which is what SketchUp is very much about. This is one of the most “sketchupy” suggestions I’ve seen in a long time.

The current system saves shortcuts as strings pointing to the menus in the menu bar. The toolbar buttons could also internally be made links to the item in the menu to allow the program to associate the button with the shortcut via the menu “address”.

I made a fast mockup what it could look like.

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Having shortcuts always display in tooltips really should be baseline behaviour.

In this case, we may safely add “for F’s sake” - at least if you follow me.

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Also, all currently set keyboard shortcuts should always be explicitly written out at the end of every row in all menu windows that list commands.

This is standard GUI wisdom in software since at least the 1990s, if not earlier.

In Sketchup, this seems to work well in the top menu dropdown menus. But when you right-click entities, the menu window displays zero keyboard shortcuts, as seen here:

Can you spot them?

Moreover, there is an unwarranted lack of one-key menu context shortcuts (seen as menu item letter underscores) for all possible entries. Why, for example, is not “Explode” accessible via the X key?

You have to have group or component selected, for it to pop up in the Preferences->shortcuts

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