Streamlining Your SolidWorks Workflow with Custom Hotkeys, Mouse Gestures, and Interface Settings

Now that we've done some modeling, in this lesson we're going to talk about setting preferences to make your work in SolidWorks as seamless as possible. This includes setting hot keys, mouse strokes, readily available command bars, and so on and so forth. So here we have this bench we created.

As you can see, since our last lesson,  I went ahead and made all the legs the same by using smart dimension in the sketch. Right now I'm using my scroll wheel by clicking it, holding it down, and moving the mouse around to view all the aspects of my bench. And as a review, if you don't have a scroll wheel,  you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to click up, down, left, right.

You can hold shift to move it 90 degrees. You can select a face and select this normal to view button to face a face directly. You can hold down CTRL and use the arrow keys to shift the positioning of your model in your space, and then holding down the ALT key and using the left and right keys can adjust the angles.

Okay, I'm going to go back to the scroll wheel. Another helpful tool for viewing our model in multiple viewpoints or elevations is to go up here to this drop down menu here called view orientation, and you can select a top view,  front view, right, back, bottom. You can select isometric.

You can view the elevations, select trimetric. You can create a custom view, which we'll do in a later lesson, or you can bring up a viewing cube, which allows you to select your position of viewing your model from different orientations, right? Let's do that again. And then we'll face it from this perspective.

Okay,  great. And we'll do one more. Let's face it from this isometric perspective, this angled perspective.

Okay, great. And again, if you have a scroll wheel, you can move that viewing cube around in space,  so you can get easier access to views like, say, the bottom view or the bottom back view,  whatever works for you. Okay, so let's set some preferences to make our life in SolidWorks as easy as possible.

Where we'll want to go is up here to the options button and select this drop down menu arrow icon. Select customize, and now we have the ability to customize things like toolbars, shortcut bars, commands, menus, keyboard keystrokes, or mouse gestures. Toolbars allows us to check or uncheck to show toolbars.

You can see how toolbars are now populating our screen as we check and uncheck them. They'll populate on the left side, the right side,  or the top, depending on the toolbar. Once you've selected your toolbars, you can click and drag to move them to a place on your screen that suits you best.

Let's leave our toolbars alone for right now because it can get a little crowded. Shortcut bars can work kind of the same way. Here along these viewing commands, we can drag other buttons to set shortcuts that we want to have readily available for us.

We can also remove them by dragging them from there and then placing them back in the shortcut bar. Again, let's leave this shortcut bar the way it's set for default and move on. We have commands, all the commands that are available in SolidWorks, which we can bring into our graphics area to have easy access to.

Let's go to keyboard, this tab right here, and let's set just a few hotkeys that I think are going to make our lives a lot easier. Now we can find the commands that we're going to set hotkeys for by going to this search for bar. Let's go ahead and search for save as.

Great. If you want to change what this is, go ahead and highlight it and press the key that you want to activate save as moving forward. I personally recommend holding CTRL shift and s at the same time because it tends to correlate with the save as commands for a lot of other programs that you might use, so you don't have to learn something new.

Another one you might want to set is normal. Now we have the normal to button right here that we've used a few times, but sometimes you want to just be able to click a face and click a button to face that face directly. In this case, I want it to be n. I don't use CTRL 8, so I'm going to delete that and just leave it as n. Now we know that if we click a face and select the key n, we'll become normal to that face through our perspective.

Great. We'll go ahead and remove it here too. That looks good.

The next hotkey I want to create is fitting our model to a screen zoom to fit. Now I already have it set as f. Now zoom to fit is a very important key because what's going to happen,  I'm going to click ok to save these. Sometimes you'll be scrolling and you'll lose your model and you'll try to find it, but it's just not showing up anywhere.

If this ever happens to you,  you can zoom to fit or in this case click f and it'll bring your entire model within your part file to the very center of your screen so you can find your place again. Now that we're here,  let's go ahead and select the face and click n. Great. Our normal to button is working great.

We'll go ahead and click hold down CTRL shift and s. Oh, it's bringing up the save as menu. This is good to know. All right, so our hotkeys are working well so far.

Let's go back up to customize and let's go to mouse gestures. Now we can set mouse gestures for when we're in a part file,  when we're in a sketch in that part file, when we're in an assembly file, or when we're in a drawing file. There are certain sketch tools that you'll want to have easy access to.

Now a mouse gesture is simply, let's cancel out of this, is clicking and holding the right key of your mouse to bring up a menu that you can then navigate your mouse to. Once you let go,  it'll navigate to that command. In this case, my mouse gestures are just showing bottom view,  top view, right view, and left view.

If I were to open up a sketch,  my mouse gesture menu would be different. They're giving me sketch tools now. We've got smart dimension up here, circle center tool up here, corner rectangle.

I'll hit escape to get out of it,  and so on and so forth. Let's close that sketch. Let's go ahead and set our mouse gestures for something that's going to be easy for us to use.

We'll go to customize, mouse gestures,  and in sketch, I want this one to the left to be centerline. This will be a tool that we use more probably than any other tool in the sketch toolbox. We'll go ahead and grab centerline and place it in the key location that works best for you.

I like my mouse gesture to the left to be centerline. You might like it moving up, down, to the right. That's okay.

I'm going to place mine to the left. I use the center circle tool a lot, so I'm going to search for center circle. Let's see.

Maybe if we search for circle, we'll have different options. Here we go. It's just called circle, and I'll make sure that that's over here.

Smart dimension is something you will use all the time as well. I would recommend you find smart dimension and make that one of your mouse gestures. Again, you can choose which one it is, but make sure it's in sketch and make sure it's one of these four options.

I like to have it at the very top. For part files, I think having the orientation is perfectly fine. Assembly, same thing.

Drawing, I like to set the drawing similar to my sketch,  but we'll cover this again as we approach drawings later in the course. For right now,  let's set our main tools in our sketch mouse gestures menu. Again, if I could recommend any two, it would be centerline and smart dimension.

You can find those by searching in the search bar. You can also open all commands and look for it here. Once we're happy with that,  let's go ahead and click okay.

Let's give it a whirl. I'm going to open up a sketch. I'm going to use my mouse gesture.

You can see that my toolbar has been set. I'm still holding down the right key on the mouse. I'm going to go ahead and move to the left.

I've just created a centerline. Great. Let's try it with smart dimension.

I'm going to hold down the right key on my mouse, move up to where smart dimension is. And now I can start setting some smart dimensions. Beautiful.

We'll go ahead and close out of this. Now, command save should be an automatic or default keyboard stroke for saving,  but just in case it's not, let's go ahead back to customize keyboards, look for save. You probably already have control S set as the save.

If not, I would recommend setting it by pressing control and S, clicking okay. Now there's one more way to create hotkeys. If you press the S key, it brings up a hotkey menu.

These are some of the default options that you'll might find your hotkey menu. And they might have commands in dropdown menus in and of themselves. If you want to add something to this, go ahead and search for it.

I'm gonna look for centerline and you can bring it and add it to your mix. You can also remove something that same way. Let's see here.

Oh, there we go. All right. Now, if we were to press S and bring up our hotkeys, centerline is one of the things we can see.

Now, if I were to select that, it's saying, wait a minute, you have to be in a sketch first to use centerline. Let's go ahead and pick a plane to create a sketch and now I can start creating a centerline. But at least we know that that hotkey will get us there.

As a reminder, please continue to save your work regularly after every few minutes and after every several commands that you create in your feature tree. If you'd like to, you can go ahead and give this a new name by doing save as, control shift S, or you can leave it as is. In the next lesson,  we're going to show the completed dataset that we're going to be working on in this course,  in which case for us is an outdoor playground.

We'll explain essentially what we're going to cover in this course, as well as drawings and assemblies and other part files we'll have to create to make it work. And I'll tell you a little bit about our methodology for creating what is going to be a complex assembly of parts and pieces.