Most of us don’t use SOLIDWORKS with any sort of fancy, new-fangled, professional 3D mouse. Instead, we make due with a standard, two-button mouse that probably comes with a scroll wheel and maybe a couple of other buttons. Does this make us any less important? Of course not! But does it put us at a disadvantage in terms of productivity? Perhaps so…
However, this doesn’t mean we can’t try to make up some ground. You are no doubt familiar with using at least some of the many hotkeys in SOLIDWORKS and being able to tailor them to fit your needs. But what about leveraging that simple point-and-click device that your primary hand rarely comes off of? Traditionally, SOLIDWORKS commands are executed by positioning the mouse over whatever command you so choose. But what if you could make those commands come to your mouse!?
This is possible with the use of Mouse Gestures. This was a tool added in back in SOLIDWORKS 2010 to help with selecting commands faster, and it’s a tool that, with practice, can really become second nature. Mouse Gestures are used by clicking and holding the right-mouse-button, and then dragging the cursor in any direction, such as dragging “due north” to generate a Top view in the example below.
A command is chosen based on which direction you drag, with the available commands varying based on the context you are in (part, assembly, etc) and by default being as follows.
Making these gestures a routine part of your workflows can really help with your efficiency, and you can take it a step further by customizing the gestures. This customization can be as simple as assigning different tools to particular gestures, or you can get fancy by assigning any macros you might have to them as well. Customizations will all be done in the Mouse Gestures tab of the Customize dialog box below. One quick change that I’ve set up is going up to 8 available gestures, doubling the gestures available by adding in some intermediate directions to our compass rose of Mouse Gestures.
And that’s about it! Mouse Gestures are a powerful time-saver SOLIDWORKS provides us that, with practice, can really help speed up your modeling. Whether or not you decide to customize, get out and use them often to start saving yourself some clicks!
This is possible with the use of Mouse Gestures. This was a tool added in back in SOLIDWORKS 2010 to help with selecting commands faster, and it’s a tool that, with practice, can really become second nature. Mouse Gestures are used by clicking and holding the right-mouse-button, and then dragging the cursor in any direction, such as dragging “due north” to generate a Top view in the example below.
A command is chosen based on which direction you drag, with the available commands varying based on the context you are in (part, assembly, etc) and by default being as follows.
Making these gestures a routine part of your workflows can really help with your efficiency, and you can take it a step further by customizing the gestures. This customization can be as simple as assigning different tools to particular gestures, or you can get fancy by assigning any macros you might have to them as well. Customizations will all be done in the Mouse Gestures tab of the Customize dialog box below. One quick change that I’ve set up is going up to 8 available gestures, doubling the gestures available by adding in some intermediate directions to our compass rose of Mouse Gestures.
And that’s about it! Mouse Gestures are a powerful time-saver SOLIDWORKS provides us that, with practice, can really help speed up your modeling. Whether or not you decide to customize, get out and use them often to start saving yourself some clicks!
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