From the course: SketchUp: Modeling Exteriors from Photos

Configuring keyboard shortcuts

From the course: SketchUp: Modeling Exteriors from Photos

Start my 1-month free trial

Configuring keyboard shortcuts

“

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to create a series of keyboard shortcuts to make working with SketchUp much more efficient. Let's begin by dragging the SketchUp application window so that it fills about half the screen like this. Then open the Exercise Files folder. I provided two different files that contain the same information in different formats. The PDF is for printing, and the TIF file allows you to edit the information in an image editor such as Adobe Photoshop, if you want to make changes to the mapping of shortcuts. At least for this course, I recommend that everyone just stick with the shortcuts as I have them so that we can all be on the same page. And then later feel free to change the shortcuts to your own liking. I'm going to double click on the PDF file to open it and resize it to fit the screen, and I'll just move this over here. Alternatively, you can print this out and then have the physical piece of paper next to your computer. Now the way I've done this is to map the most commonly used commands to the different letters of the alphabet. So for example, L is for Line, M is for Move, A is for Arc, R is for Rectangle. But in some cases, the letters don't match up. So Rotate should be R, but R was already taken for Rectangle so I had to assign Rotate to a different letter and I chose Q because it's in the upper left-hand corner of the keyboard and I can remember it that way. So this is my own idiosyncratic list, as you can appreciate, but I think that these are the most important tools that you'll want to toggle on and off as you're using SketchUp. So let's go ahead and get started mapping these in the SketchUp program. So I'll click on SketchUp and go to the SketchUp menu on the Mac and choose Preferences. In the Windows operating system, there is no SketchUp menu. Instead you'll have to use the Window menu and choose Preferences. Either way, you'll come into this dialog box where you can choose the Shortcuts page, and this shows you a list of all of the different functions that can be mapped. And as you see, they're organized by menu. So we could scroll down the list and find Tools/Rotate, but it's much quicker if you just type in rotate into the filter and it will show you all of the functions that contain that word. In this case, I'm interested in Tools/Rotate, so I'll click on that and then just press the letter Q on the keyboard and it's mapped. In Windows there's one additional step, that is you have to click the Plus button to actually map the key. Let's go ahead and clear the filter and do our next shortcut. I'll click in here and type the next one which is Edit/Unhide/Last. I'll just type unhide, and then click the function in the list, and then press W. Once more, the next one is Tools/Eraser. I'll type eraser, click on the function and type E. Continue in this way mapping all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the space bar, so that you can match up SketchUp to this cheat sheet. I recommend that you print out this cheat sheet and have it next to your computer as you're learning SketchUp.

Contents