What’s the difference between dynamic input and command line input of coordinates in CAD?

When drawing in CAD, we often see the coordinates around cross cursor showing, that’s dynamic input, ash shown in the following picture.

Dynamic input allows us to focus on the drawing without having to look at the command line and therefore improves our drawing efficiency. So what’s the exact difference of dynamic input and command line input.

When you are inputting coordinates

When you are not locating any point, then the coordinates to be entered are absolute coordinates. When locating to the next point, the default would be relative coordinates without adding @ before the coordinates. This is because relative coordinates are more frequently used.

But here comes a problem, for example, if we want to move an object from the current location to the origin of coordinates, and if we enter 0,0, we’ll find that the object remains, because what we enters actually equals @0.0. In this case, we’ll need to move the cursor to the command line and enter 0,0 or disable the dynamic input and then enter 0,0. If we want to enter absolute coordinates in the dynamic input box, we need to enter # first, for example, if we enter #20, 30, that equals entering 20, 30 in the command line and entering #20<45 equals entering 20<45 in the command line.

Please note since we can specify direction by using the cursor, we can directly enter distance and press Enter to specify the coordinates of the next point, if you enter #20 and press Enter, this is the same as entering 20 and then pressing Enter, except that you specify a point 20 distance in the cursor direction from the last point.

How to set the dynamic input

We can customize the settings of dynamic input by setting the default input method as inputting X, Y coordinates, or we can even set the dynamic input as directly inputting absolute coordinates.

The setting is simple, right-click the dynamic input button at the bottom status bar to open the dynamic input dialog box, click the Settings button, we can set the default to Polar format or Cartesian format, Relative coordinates or Absolute coordinates.