Parital Workaround for Mouse Customization
I'm new to Bricscad, having just come over from 20 years of AutoCAD. So far, I really like what I've seen, with the exception of the mouse customization issue, the subject of many posts here on the forum. After playing with it for a couple of days, I've come up with a partial workaround that some of you may like.
The main problem is that we apparently cannot create individual menus of our own which can then be used as mouse menus. (Not yet, anyway.) In fact, there seems to be only three existing context menus that we can use with the mouse buttons, Grips, Edit and Snap. Other than those three, all I've been able to do is program individual commands, like "move", to a button.
My solution: Change one of the three existing menus. I've never been a fan of Grips, anyway, and so what I did was simply go in and delete all the entries in the grips menu and then added my own macros to it instead. Then just assign the grips menu to a mouse button and wa-la, it works great. Those of you who are heavy users of those three menus won't be as impressed, of course, but that's okay. Maybe you'll want to edit one of them instead. Delete a few items on the, say, the grips menu that you don't use, and replace them with macros or commands of your own. That'll work, too.
I'm sure Bricscad will have a more elegant solution down the road, but for today it's just what I needed.
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Are those menus within the CUI file, Charles?
Used to be easy a few years ago to edit a new MNU which came with a new release, or just keep using the old one. But CUI's are not so easy to edit and I have 38 of them buried in my system after a number of Bcad upgrades and customisation experiments.
I now tack on my own MNU and leave the main one alone, but as you say that can't override such things as mouse buttons.
There was a solution here to use the custom menu as the main and call the default menu the file to be tacked on... I think. But also too hard for me.
Whatever you do, do it with an eye for what will happen when you upgrade/update - that might contain a menu improvement, might overwrite your customised file anyway. Bricsys frequently offer minor releases with improvements and bug fixes, unlike many other software producers who just pretend there is nothing to be addressed until the next major revision.
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Yes, I tried to use the partial cui idea, but I couldn't make it work. I created the partial file okay, but I tried for a couple of days to activate it without success.
If you want to try the technique I described above, pull down the tools menu, then click on 'customize'. Once there, scroll down to the context menus and expand it out to see the items under it. As part of that group you'll find "Edit", "Grips" and "Entity Snap". Those are the three menus you can select for use with the mouse. In my case, I selected "grips", and then deleted all the entries in that menu. In your case, you could try just adding an item to that menu to see how it works. You do that by right-clicking on "grips" then select "append item". Choose an available tool from the right hand menu or create your own macro just like you would in your .mnu file.
Once you have that menu the way you want it, then choose the "Mouse" tab at the top. Expand the "mouse buttons" and you'll see "click", shift-click, etc. Expand the one you want to modify. In my case, I chose "shift-click". Then right-click on "shift-click" and select "append button". When the "add button item" dialog opens, scroll down to "context" and then select "grips menu" or whichever one you edited, and that will be appended to the shift-click mouse button. Remember, you can only have two items per mouse button. Your first entry under shift-click is for the right mouse button. I have the "snap menu" selected for that button. The second entry is for the middle button and I chose "grips menu" for that one. So what I get is the snap menu for shift-right-click and my modified grips menu for shift-middle-click.
Hope this helps. As I noted earlier, the Bricscad folks will no doubt have a better solution in the not to distant future.
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You can edit the CUI's function within one installation that way, but I'm not sure it stores customisations in the original CUI file.
Then you couldn't backup the changes to hedge against overwriting or to transfer to another system or version when Bcad makes a separate installation, as it does from V11 to V12.
If you can find the correct CUI and it does store the changes, you might want to back it up. The editor lets you know where it is, but if your memory is like mine you won't remember the complete address between closing Bcad and going hunting for it with a Windows explorer.
I noted some time ago that some Acad users confine menu customisations to a separate MNU file as I do.
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