I am a fan of keyboard short cuts. I try to use my thumb track ball mouse to simply navigate, select, give direction for a line to follow and right click.
I am a big fan of using the flip feature on Sketchup for forming mirror images of furniture pieces. Works great for duplicating side panels loaded with dado's and or face frame stiles that have horizontal dado's and vertical grooves.
To flip a component you select the component, right click, look down the list that pops up, and locate the Flip Along option, and then select the axis that you want to use. Not too difficult but I use that command a lot and wished I had a short cut for that feature.
About 20 minutes after Swingman showed me this flip function vs using the -1 along with the scale tool I was sold and looking for a short cut key. There was none to be had. But I did not believe that to be true, I must not be looking in the right place to accomplish this. For months maybe years I have longed for that short cut function.
Last week I had that itch again. In my exploring the innerd's of Sketchup I found the path to the Pot of Gold for assigning short cuts. Now don't get me wrong, I have always known about the "system preferences", 'shortcuts" window. It gives you a list of functions/commands that have and can be assigned short cut keys.
Looking again for the elusive "flip along" function in the list it magically appeared after all this time, and then as quickly as it appeared it disappeared.
OK, the trick to finding the BIG list of functions that I called the Pot Of Gold is to first select something in the drawing that actually shows the function that you want to assign a short cut to when you right click. Depending on what you choose, a line, component, group, etc you will get a different list of functions when you right click. Once you have selected, in this case a component, and go back to the system preferences, short cut window, the functions available with your right click are now added to the list of functions that you can assign short cut to. Unselect that object on the drawing and the function list shrinks.
So now, I simply press the key of my choice to perform the flip function on the component that I have selected.
Because I use so many short cut keys many are the same key for different functions. Assigning a particular key with Ctrl or Alt enables a single key to have different functions. For instance I type "d" to start the dimension tool. I type "Ctrl D" to start the command that gives me the over all x,y,z dimensions of a selected object or component.
To make thing even easier/more complex, I use a Logitech G510 gaming key board strictly for the added programmable keys, 18 additional in 3 different modes. These keys enable me to have single key short cuts that replaces multiple key strokes.
Hope that information helps any one that may have wanted more short cuts.
When drawing I typically form a component and assign a material/color to it immediately. That material/color represents and is named the type material that I am going to use for that particular component.
For instance I paint the component with a material, say the color blue, and rename that color Oak Plywood. I paint another component with the material, the color red, and name it oak. I am not so much concerned with the color being similar to the wood I am going to use as being able to color a component with a material that does not hide/distort the actual lines in the component. Wood grain in a material makes it difficult to see the detailed lines of a component so I use colors. As a side note if yu take a color and modify it to be transparent to some degree it essentially makes a solid panel into what appears to be see through glass in the shade of you liking.
Anyway assigning materials/colors can bog down the computer on complex drawings so after assigning I turn the monochrome icon back on and the computer is back to normal operating speed. No mystery there.
What I am in curious about is why it takes longer to save a complex drawing when the material/colors are displayed than it does when drawing is in monochrome mode.
Any thoughts on that? One might suspect that only the material reference is saved when saving in monochrome mode. Yes I have purged all unused materials etc. before saving.
Now considering the possibility that in monochrome mode only the reference to your inventory of materials is saved and the computer looks for those materials when you open the drawing would make sense except when Swingman and I exchange drawings and he or I use materials that are not on each others computers. The materials still show up.
Ok, lastly is any one using the new 3dconnexion Space Mouse? Not the Space Navigator. Will the Space Mouse replace a mouse too.