AutoCAD® Command AutoComplete

Before I get into the specifics of this post, I'd like to acknowledge that you may have experienced a lull in posts and responses to comments over the last few weeks... I have been away from my usual lifestyle... celebrating my recent marriage on the 4th of June. That's right - I'm now a married man... which I think will work out well for my readers - now that I have a wife to try to escape from, I'll no doubt be writing more posts that I ever have! I am of course only joking - and without intending to paint my personal life all over these posts, I couldn't be happier.

Secondly, I'd like to celebrate reaching 100 subscribers! I'm amazed at the response HowToAutoCAD.com is getting from you all. Rest assured that I have so far only scratched the surface of what I can write about - this site is certainly still only in its infancy. As an early subscriber, I'll make sure you get special treatment at some point... ;-)

So, what was this post going to be about again... ah yes... here goes...

This has undoubtedly happened to you. You know what you want to do, and you know that a command exists to do it. But for the life of you, you've forgotten what the exact command name is... but you kind of think it started with CONV. There's a useful feature in AutoCAD® to deal with this - the command autocomplete feature. Just type in what you know, and you can toggle through all the commands that start with what you typed with the TAB key. So in the case of CONV, you could toggle all the way to CONVTOMESH and go "ahhh yes, that's what it was called!".

Pleasingly, this also includes system variables. So if you forgot the exact name for the system variable that controls polyline linetype generation, but you remember it started with PL, just enter what you know and tab through to PLINEGEN.

One of my subscribers has kindly been in touch with an addition. Laurie Comerford writes:

"Not only does your tip work for Autodesk created commands, but it includes new commands defined in .NET code, which is a joy for me as I'm currently testing these commands and instead of typing:

'LaurieTestLandscape' or some other overlong command names I've defined, all I need is Lau<Tab>"

This tip has helped me out several times, and I'm sure it will do the same for you if you didn't already know it.

Will

Comments

john coon
2011-06-21 11:20:28

Will,

congrads! It was the greatest thing I've ever done in my life.......you for you.