I’m wondering if there is any good way to manage the plugins tools bars (palettes) display on a mac (as it is possible on a PC).
I have many of them and I’m struggling to find a good way to manage and organize them on my screen.
Also, some of the plugin tool bars (palettes) are launching when I start Sketchup. I didnt find the way to unlaunch them at startup.
Is anyone can help on these two points :
Managing plugins tools bars display on screen.
Reset plugins tools bars display at sketchup launch.
If you close a toolbar palette, quit SketchUp, then open SketchUp, the palette should not be there. The extension is supposed to respect your preference but I know there are some out there that don’t. To fix this, you’d have to contact the extension developer and ask them to change it.
The extension should be calling toolbar.restore instead of toolbar.show. The restore method is used to reposition the toolbar to its previous location and show if not hidden.
If palettes are not staying hidden for extensions you rarely use, you could disable the extension. The Sketchucation extension lets you make sets of extensions to disable/enable multiple extensions at once.
As for organising them, there’s not much you can do apart from arrange them yourself. Keep them vertical if you want to see the tooltips.
SketchUp’s ability to manage toolbars is very limited on Mac compared to on Windows. Toolbars (aka palettes on Mac) will snap to the left or top edge of the screen, but not to each other or to anything else. And @McGordon already pointed out that due to a bug, they don’t show tooltips when snapped to the top edge. It is very common to get one showing atop another or hidden under another, in which case there is no recourse but to move them around and look for obscured ones. As a result, Mac users rarely have a huge collection of toolbars visible the way Windows users often do.
And, before you ask, Mac users have begged for improvement in toolbar management on Mac for years with no effect to date.
Thank you very much for this info. Unfortunately it does not appear that Sketchup is ready to offer a solution. Their only answer to me yet is to see on forums … What a shame. It seems that Sketchup expects its users to find the solutions to the software bug by themselves …
This was the most helpful piece of information I have found on the internet after 3 days of searching and yet still it does not help . Do you know of any extension or solution that would allow me to put more than one row of tools in the top tool bar, or as you said, snap tool extensions to it. I have tried it once but the ‘toolbar editing’ extension was unfortunately not compatible for Mac OS. Please let me know if you know of any solution at all. I need more tools to stay permanently On my screen without floating.
Have a Elgato Stream Deck that I use for app management and stream event management. It has 15 clear plastic buttons that small icons can be mapped to and multiples of pages are programmable space.
If one had the patience to map every plugin’s buttons to a page of their respective tool images, one could effectively have a toolbar short cut hardware platform right above one’s keyboard. This would be useful to PC and Mac users. One could even have multiple stream decks I suppose.
Plugin’s themselves are software solutions that were a result of the native platform refusing to adapt beyond it’s base simplicity. I guess hardware plugins are an extension of this effort as well. I know that @ArayaCAD showed me his small space mouse setup where I believe he had most of his plugin toolbars mapped to that small little set of buttons.
Sounds tedious to setup, but when it is, the amount of clicks and mouse movement would be massively reduced on the right hand in favor of left hand button mashing. And, it would eliminate any need for onscreen tool bars, floating or mounted.
Really!
So cool!
Would you be willing to share some screen shots of one or two of your pages?
How about your desktop. Do have the unit right above the keyboard?
The second row is Curic’s DIO2 – the first three invoke an AHK script because the DIO2 trim tools are in the tools context menu and are not accessible as shortcuts.
I use the Stream Deck to perform those more convoluted shortcut combinations that need a second hand.
I bought a new Macbook after 10years of using windows, and now iI recognized what a bad choise, really it s a shame so many users and so bad support!!!
I have a MacBook and I love it, maybe you are used to the windows UI, on Mac you can’t stack tool bars like you do it on windows it may be a problem if you like to have dozens of toolbars on your screen, I prefer a clean viewport and activate toolbars just when I need them, I also use a plugin to create custom toolbars on Mac and windows, with tools for specific tasks like organic modeling.
. Do you know of any extension or solution that would allow me to put more than one row of tools in the top tool bar, or as you said, snap tool extensions to it. I have tried it once but the ‘toolbar editing’ extension was unfortunately not compatible for Mac OS. Please let me know if you know of any solution at all. I need more tools to stay permanently On my screen without floating.
