I’ve been looking into how this could work with AHK but with my level of AHK knowledge I can’t get anything to work.
That’s if it can work with AHK…?
Since I posted here in 2015 All I found is what SketchUp provides. You have H for Hand / Pan tool. O for Orbit are the keyboard defaults.
If your middle mouse wheel on depressed produces the orbit tool in the window. While depressing the middle button also right-context-click. It gives you a drop down of camera options. You can go back and forth between the two tools. Then re-open it the same way. Also once you have the Pan tool active, simply depressing the middle button you start to Orbit. As soon as you release it your Pan tool is back active.
This works with the other tools also, If I Push-Pull a face and the tool is still active. Slightly pressing middle mouse wheel down I Orbit freely, can right click the camera options. Then when I release the middle wheel the Push-Pull tool or whatever tool I had just used is still active.
Toggle through all the options is easy peasy.
Funny is that H is the keyboard shortcut key for the Pan Tool. But in the context menu it is assigned P for Pan. P on the keyboard is for Push Pull.
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I’m not sure because I haven’t messed around with it for a long time, but CadMouse by 3Dconnexion is pretty customizable. I know it’s an expensive mouse, but I am converted and don’t see me ever using another mouse.
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If you use windows Power Toys, it lets you remap buttons under keyboard Manager & it
works well, so in sketchup if I want the alt key to pan like Autocad & Revit, you can, then you can switch it back to normal in a minute for when you want to use those programs. Follow the link for a how to.
I had created a simple solution to remap pan & orbit, check it here https://github.com/beny74483/sketchup-mouse-remapper.
As a software guru, 99.999% of pan/orbit has someone pushing a key and then moving the mouse at the same time. The “how do you reach contextual menus” is not an issue — people don’t move the mouse when they are doing contextual menus (or at least not by much).
This UI/UX is easily resolved, but it, unfortunately, requires someone to implement it.
I use a Mac system and was also thinking, “Oh, I can have pan and orbit per mouse button” then discovered, no, that is not possible.
It’s surprising that someone hasn’t pointed out that it IS doable.
Still a basic missing option in 2021.
This drives me mental as well. Especially when working in orthographic top-down view and accidentally hitting the MMB. My workaround was to map a couple keys as follows:
z = Zoom
x = Pan
c = Orbit
You’ll see these three keys are tucked nicely at lower left of keyboard close to the Shift and Alt keys that most use with the LMB. Note that you can have more than one letter assigned to a hotkey. I have both the “h” and “x” to invoke the pan (hand) tool separately.
Hope this is an option for someone until Sketchup finally listens to their paying customers and breaks the horrible MMB situation.
Just adding my support for this feature request. Our office uses SKP, Rhino, AutoCAD, Adobe, and obviously Revit. I have a dream that some day navigation can become standard between all of these. At the least having options of where I want to map pan/rotate/zoom would allow me to standardize my navigation across all my apps.
Consider using a3d connexion space mouse instead. It would solve your frustrations. I love flying effortlessly around the 3d space so much.
You can change it by yourself using the app called ‘SteerMouse’ on Mac. It allows you to switch ‘Middle click’ and ‘Shift + Middle click.’ Works nice for me.
I created a forum account just to vent about this.
I would imagine that the average CAD user has more than one software in their tool kit. On a daily, professional basis, I use AutoCAD, AGi32, Revit, and SketchUp. I also frequently use (on a hobby basis) Blender, Fusion 360, and to a lesser extent, Inventor.
Using SketchUp is like suddenly driving on the left side of the road in the UK at intervals when I drive on the right side of the road in the US for most of the day. It would be terrific if Trimble acknowledged that many CAD users have more than one software in their toolkit and would desire a smooth synchronous workflow between them all. Instead, there are unnecessary productivity stutters when hopping in and out of their software.
The navigation on blender is as on sketchup, middle mouse button to orbit and middle mouse button + holding shift, to pan. If you have a mouse with programmable buttons you can set a shortcut for panning and the same shortcut + shift to orbit, then set the middle button of the mouse with the key you selected as shortcut and you’ll have the same behavior like on autocad, Revit, archicad etc.
it would be terrific if ALL CAD companies acknowledged that many CAD users have more than one software in their toolkit and would desire a smooth synchronous workflow between them all.
I mean, beyond Trimble, I can’t believe that none of the big CAD companies offers that choice.
Some archicad users will tell you that using SU is annoying because it’s inverted. I’m one of the sketchup users that find using archicad annoying because it’s inverted.
and just like the imperial / metric or driving left / driving right, I don’t see it change anytime soon.