In this video,
we will be exploring the various ways of customizing the toolbars and Chief
Architect.
It is important to understand the basic anatomy of the toolbars before we begin
customizing them. To start,
looking at the preferences dialog on the appearance panel,
there are options to choose what style of toolbar you want to use,
child tool palette or drop-down, set the toolbar icon size,
as well as allowing scaling for high-resolution monitors,
which tries to keep the icons an appropriate size relative to the scaling
setting on your operating system.
This is only used if you are using a high-resolution monitor and your computer
has to scale up its interface to avoid objects being too small.
So if you are using a high-resolution monitor,
you will want to make sure that this is checked and that the button size is set
to a sufficient enough value to make the buttons an adequate size on your
toolbars. Looking at a typical plan view,
by default,
you will see two rows of toolbars across the top of the screen and while it may
appear as being two toolbars,
these rows are merely toolbar docking areas that each contain multiple toolbars.
Toolbars are containers that can hold as few or as many tool icons as needed.
They can be identified by the small drag handle located on the left side,
which not only helps to differentiate one toolbar from the next but also allows
you to click and drag to move this selected toolbar within the docking area.
When directing a toolbar within a row or column it currently resides,
it may result in collapsing or pushing nearby toolbars.
You will notice that when a toolbar is pushed to be smaller,
a small double arrow appears.
You may also see this if you are running Chief on a relatively low screen
resolution where the toolbars may not fit within the given area.
This arrow allows you to click to expand the toolbar so you can access the
hidden icons.
Moving a toolbar out of the row or column it's currently in will undock the
toolbar.
You will then see a shaded feedback area indicating the new position of the
selected toolbar,
dragging a toolbar next to an existing toolbar will give feedback showing that a
new toolbar, row, or column will be created.
When you are satisfied with the position of your toolbars,
you can lock the toolbars by going to tools, then toolbars and hotkeys,
and choosing lock toolbars.
This removes the drag handles so they can not be moved unless unlocked or when
in the customized toolbars dialog.
The toolbar locations will be saved even after the program is closed and
reopened. However,
it should be noted that undocked or floating toolbars are exempt from being
locked.
Their location will still be remembered after relaunching in the program.
However,
they act as independent windows that can still be closed or moved by dragging
their title bar.
You can access the toolbar menu by right-clicking any blank toolbar location or
active toolbar button. Here,
you can quickly toggle specific toolbars on or off,
or switch between toolbar configurations.
Note that these same configurations are available in the toolbar with the
exception of the extended toolbar configuration giving access to many advanced
tools.
This is a good example of what a highly customized toolbar might look like.
To make these kind of customizations access the right-click menu again and
select customize toolbars or click the tools menu,
then toolbars and hotkeys and customize toolbars.
While the toolbar customization dialog is displayed you'll be able to drag and
move existing icons to rearrange them within their current toolbar or move them
to other existing toolbars.
Tools can also be dragged from the toolbar customization dialogs tools panel by
clicking and dragging the icon either to an existing toolbar or to a blank area,
creating a new toolbar. If you need to remove a tool from a toolbar,
simply drag the icon off into an area where no toolbars exist.
At the top of both the tools in toolbars panels is a view type dropdown.
This indicates the type of view that you are in and as such,
the type of view you are currently customizing. Changing this selection,
you will see the toolbars change. For instance,
selecting the material view type,
the toolbars change to reflect the toolbars available when viewing a materials
list.
So you don't have to close the customization dialog and open a materials list
view in order to edit the toolbars present in that view.
When looking for tools to add,
you can browse the list in the tools panel or use the search function to find a
specific tool. When searching certain terms,
you may find that the results don't necessarily match exactly what you searched.
This is because the search is looking not only for the tool name but also the
description. For example, searching just the word wall,
the very first tool displayed in the results is angle snaps,
which is not a wall specific tool. However,
when selecting the tool description below states that it applies to walls or CAD
lines,
so this particular tool will appear when searching for any of the words in the
description including walls, CAD, or line.
There are a few important visual clues to be aware of when looking at the tools
displayed in this list.
Some entries will have an ellipsis at the end of it indicating that this is an
icon that opens in dialog. Some entries have an arrow to the left,
meaning that this entry can be expanded to show a list of tools nested below.
These are referred to as parent tools and child tools.
A parent tool can be dragged onto a toolbar creating a similarly expandable
toolbar button. Likewise,
individual child tools can be dragged out independent of the parent tool.
This is useful if you only need a few of the tools under a particular parent
tool rather than the entire list.
Keep in mind that the lists under parent tool icons are not editable,
so if you only need a few child tools from a specific parent,
they must be added as individual icons to a toolbar.
When dragged from the tools list into an area where there are no tools a
floating undocked toolbar will be created.
Keep in mind that dragging tools out of an existing toolbar will result in the
tool icon being removed.
If they are placed in any location other than a toolbar.
A new toolbar will only be created when dragging them out of this list of tools.
On the toolbar panel,
we have a table showing all of the toolbars available and what view each toolbar
applies to. Here,
we can quickly show or hide different toolbars from different views without
having to go to each view and manually remove unwanted toolbars.
Adding or removing the checkmark from these columns will show or hide the
toolbar from that respective view.
Adding or removing a toolbar by any other means will be reflected on this table
as well. For instance,
when a new toolbar is created,
it will automatically be listed here with a check in the column associated with
the view it was created in.
In closing a floating toolbar will remove the check for that toolbar.
New toolbars will be listed here beginning with the word custom,
followed by the name of the first tool that was placed when this toolbar was
made. To rename a toolbar, simply double click the toolbar name.
To remove a toolbar,
simply select it and press the delete button in the lower-left to remove it from
the current toolbar configuration. Otherwise,
when removing the last tool icon from a toolbar,
the toolbar will be deleted automatically.
To restore the toolbars to their default state for the current configuration,
use the reset toolbars button on the lower right. Lastly,
the configuration panel lists all toolbar configurations currently available.
Here,
you can switch between or copy existing configurations in order to create your
own customized toolbar configuration and remove any unwanted ones.
The import button can be used to add new tool parts to this list in the event
that toolbar configuration files have been shared between computers.