Create custom shortcuts - SketchUp Tutorial

- [George] Hi I'm George Maestri and today we're going to take a look at how to be a little more efficient in SketchUp using shortcuts. Now when you work with SketchUp you'll find that there's a lot of keyboard shortcuts. But there are some that are probably needed. So, I'm going to go through some of the ones that I've added into SketchUp and hopefully you'll find them valuable as well. Now, when we work with keyboard shortcuts we want to go into Window, Preferences, and then under SketchUp Preferences we have Shortcuts. So what we can do is we can add in a shortcut for anything. We can also filter this. So if I want to see everything in Edit, I can type Edit and as you can see it brings up everything with the word edit in it. Now this is case sensitive so you need to be sure that you type it in correctly. So, one of the first things I want to do is work with my view modes. So, when I go into View, a lot of times I'm switching between x-ray and wire frame and shaded mode and all of that. And so I want to add those into some specific keys. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make my number keys one, two, three, and four ways to change my view mode. Now, I come from a Maya background and those are the view keys in Maya, so that's kind of why I'm using them. Now, one of the things when we go into Preferences, we can go down into, again, this is View, so I'm going to type in View and you can see here we've got View/Face Style. Okay, this is what we want. We want Hidden Line, Monocrome, Wireframe and so on. So, I'm going to go ahead and go View/Face Style/Wireframe and I'm going to add a shortcut. Now, the number one key is already reserved, so if I type in one, it's going to give me an error. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do control one. So, I'm going to highlight this, hit control one and hit plus and that will now give me Wireframe mode. So if I hit okay and hit control one, I'm now in Wireframe mode. So, let's go ahead and add in some more. So, again, I'm going to go into View. So, I'm going to go ahead and add in a few more. So, I want to do either Hidden Line or Monochrome so I'm going to select Hidden Line and I'm going to make that control plus two. I'm going to go down to say Shaded with Textures. Let's go ahead and make that control plus three. And now the last one is Face Style/X-ray, and I'm going to do control plus four. So now if I hit control one, two, three, four, I can get all of my viewing modes. So, I can go control four to toggle x-ray and then one, two and three just add increasing levels of detail. Now, if I want, I can also do some other ones. One of the things I like to do is to hide and show objects a lot, so, if I go into Edit, I have Hide and Unhide. I have Unhide selected, Last or All. So, one of the things we have to do when working with shortcuts is make sure that we're not using a key that's already being used. So, if you have a map of the SketchUp shortcuts, that helps, but I do know that the X key is available. So, I like to use X as Hide and shift and control X as Unhide. So, let's go back into Preferences. And let's go ahead and filter it for the Edit menu. So, we're going to type in capital Edit. We're going to go ahead and filter for the Edit menu. And then I'm going to scroll down to Hide and I'm going to add a shortcut of the letter X. And then let's go down and make Unhide/Last shift X, and Unhide/All control X. Oh, and control X is already used by Edit and Cut. So, let's go ahead and remove that. And let's go ahead and make it alt X. And hit okay. So, now I've got an object, I can hit X to hide it. Shift X to unhide it and if we want we can do alt X to unhide all. Now, I've got one more that I really like to use and that's, again, under the edit menu. So, we have control C for Copy, control V for Paste, but we don't have Past In Place, so I'm going to make that shift V. So, again we're going to go into Preferences, go into the Edit menu. And under Paste In Place, I'm going to add in shift V and hit okay. So, now I have a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that are in addition to the ones that SketchUp already uses. Go ahead and just take a look at how you work. And if there are keyboard shortcuts that you need, go ahead and create them for yourself.