Keyboard Shortcuts

As you develop your work-flow and find you use commands often, you can assign hot keys to enter them for you. You might want to assign Ctrl+R to the oft-used rats for example.

Key bindings are a personal thing. You will probably want to bind a hot-key to the route command ( for board view ) with trace widths pre-filled.

Creating A Shortcut: Using The GUI

To create a shortcut;

• open up the "Options" menu and choose "Assign",
• click "New",
• choose the key you want to bind in the drop-down menu,
• pick the modifiers you want to use (I tend to use just Ctrl),
• type any valid command into the "Assign command" box,
• hit "ok", "ok" to finish,
• try out your new shortcut!

You'll use grids often, at two or three different sizes depending on what you're laying out. Shortcuts are great for switching between them.

Creating A Shortcut: Using The Command Bar

There's a shortcut to creating shortcuts. Just type assign modifier+key command into the command bar.

For example, you could create the ratsnest shortcut I mentioned earlier by typing: assign ctrl+r rats.

Shortcuts can also trigger many commands. If you wanted to create a route shortcut on Ctrl+1 you could type: assign ctrl+1 miter 0;route 8mil

Setting miter 0 will ensure your routes radius is set to 0. I find this gets set and forgotten about when I miter the corners of rectangles.

If you wanted to set a useful grid, reset miter and start routing at 8mil you could: assign ctrl+1 grid mil 8;miter 0;route 8mil.