Creating Your Own Keyboard Shortcuts.

This chapter explains how to create your own keyboard shortcuts. A keyboard shortcut maps a key press (e.g. F5) to a particular menu (e.g. "This Design" - "Room Settings"). You can only use the function keys (F1 though to F12). Some of these keys already have shortcuts assigned to them.

Creating a Shortcut

Shortcuts are stored in C:\articad\accelerators.txt. By default it should open in "Notepad", though you can use any text editor.

NOTE - Exit from ArtiCAD before editing the accelerators.txt file. You should also make a backup copy of the original version supplied.

Below is the standard accelerators.txt supplied with ArtiCAD:

A shortcut consists of three parts:

key code = menu code     description

Key Code

The number corresponding to the key you press e.g. pressing "F5" generates the number 116. See the Key Codes table below.

Menu Code

The number corresponding to a menu within ArtiCAD e.g. "Mode" - "Drag and Drop" has the number 7054.

Description

Anything after the menu code is treated as a description. Can be left blank.

As an example we will create a shortcut for "F6" to be the equivalent of clicking "View" - "3D Perspective" - "Normal View". From the key code table we see the number for "F6" is 117, and from the menu code table we see the code for "Normal View" is 7009.

Putting this information together, we would add the following line to accelerators.txt:

117 = 7009       F6 for normal view

Should you need more keys than F1 through F12, you can specify a key pressed with "Control"/"Ctrl", "Shift" or both.

• A key code with "c" infront denotes having "Control"/"Ctrl" pressed at the same time.
• A key code with "s" infront denotes having "Shift" pressed at the same time.
• A key code with "sc" infront denotes having "Shift" and "Control"/"Ctrl" pressed at the same time.

For Example:

s117 = 7010       Shift + F6 for back against selected wall

sc117 = 7011       Shift + Control + F6 for bird's eye view

NOTE - F1 and F3 are already defined in the standard accelerators.txt.

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