We can use key­board to quick­ly start options or com­mands in menu, com­mand pan­el and dia­log box. There are three main ways.

1. Use key­board in menu

For those who are more accus­tomed to using Gstar­CAD Clas­sic work­space, short­cut keys are avail­able in menu. Have you seen the under­lined char­ac­ter N in New which is red cir­cled below? The char­ac­ter is the short­cut key for that menu item, the same goes to oth­er menu items.

This is not as con­ve­nient as mouse click­ing, but you could try it when you’re using a lap­top or when there is no mouse avail­able.

2. Use key­board in com­mand pan­el

We nor­mal­ly click icons in the com­mand pan­el to use com­mands. Actu­al­ly, we can also use key­board to exe­cute some com­mands.

By default the com­mand pan­el doesn’t dis­play those short­cut keys, just press ALT key, and those short­cut keys will show,

Press the short­cut key as prompt­ed such as H, and the pan­el will dis­play com­mand short­cuts, shown as below,

3. Use key­board to set up dia­log box para­me­ters

Short­cut keys are usu­al­ly avail­able in dia­log options and para­me­ters and some­times it might be more effi­cient to use short­cut keys than mouse click­ing. Take the fol­low­ing Object Snap dia­log box as an exam­ple, shown as below,

As we can see in the above pic­ture, most options pro­vide short­cut keys except for only a few options that don’t sup­port short­cut keys. Short­cut keys F3 and F11 can be used with­out open­ing this dia­log box.

For exam­ple, we can turn on or off Mid­point by press­ing M.

Please note: The dia­log box must be acti­vat­ed for short­cut keys to func­tion.