30 April 2009

RST Keyboard Shortcut Philosophy

So I'm working on the RST 2010 keyboard shortcuts - it is work believe me. Every ribbon has its own chunk in the file, and many commands repeat over and over. To begin to develop a plan I had to first beg an Excel expert to lend a hand. He customized a xls to do automatic placement of shortcuts based on the ribbon verbage. In a nutshell, when Refence Plane is defined as RP in one row, all other Reference Plane entries on other ribbons get an RP as well.

So I went through the file in whole, assigning shortcuts. What is my philosophy on it?

Commands that I use a lot (like beam) get 2 letter shortcut and will be moved to the top. So BM will start Beam but also B will as well.

Commands that I use a little less but when used, are used repeatedly, get double letter shortcut if available. For example, Align is AA. It could have been AL and then put at the top so that A fires it - I personally think that isn't needed for double letter commands.

Commands that are used daily but not frequently, two letters based on the wording hopefully. So like Reference Plane being RP. Not the best placement on the keyboard but not a killer. Depending on more frequent commands, it may be moved to the top so that R fires.

Then infrequent commands that by the nature of the lack of use will be hard to remember - first letter shortcuts. For example, Dimension Radial is DRA.

After this it gets sketchy - some commands won't get assigned a shortcut since remembering them will be next to impossible. While others will get assigned and hopefully be intelligently named so as to remember them.

2 comments:

cadalot said...

David

I'm halfway through locating where all the repeated functions are in each tab, then found your posting. Any chance of the spreadsheet of the base shortcut key file, so I can build my shortcuts and get Excell to fill in duplicates?

David Harrington said...

Check the next post... ;)