Toolbars

Autodesk is taking a public survey regarding your UI preferences. Do you like the Ribbon or do you like toolbars and pull-down menus? It sounds like they are considering removing pull-downs and toolbars from AutoCAD.

I can not figure out what purpose this would possibly serve. The screen menu has been dead for a decade or more and it's still available if you want to use it...

Let Autodesk know your thoughts by taking this survey.

It's not uncommon for someone, even these days in the era of the Ribbon, to want to turn on a toolbar. Many people know that you can right click in the toolbar area, and each loaded menugroup will be listed, then you can choose the appropriate toolbar to display.

But what if you don't have any toolbars showing at all? Then there is not a suitable location in which to right click.

Here is what you do, run the -TOOLBAR command. Note the leading hyphen, which calls the command line version of this command. The first prompt asks for the toolbar name. Enter a toolbar name such as "MODIFY". Then it will ask you how you want to display the toolbar. Press "F" for float. It will then ask you for coordinates at which to place the toolbar. You can accept the defaults (0,0) and the toolbar will appear in the upper left corner of your primary monitor. If you want to specify a certain location, be aware that the values increase as you move left and down. So if you specify a location of 300,500, the toolbar will be placed 300 pixels to the left and 500 pixels below the upper left corner of your primary monitor. The last prompt it asks you is how many rows for the toolbar.

Of course you could script this using a menu macro or lisp routine. If you watch the prompts on the -TOOLBAR command, you'll see that you can hide toolbars also, so it's possible to setup some shortcuts to show and hide various toolbars - which should be quicker than switching workspaces. Read more »