Customize the Status Bar with MODEMACRO

Did you know that there's an area of the status bar that you can use to display your own custom messages in AutoCAD LT? It's right where the red arrow is pointing in the image below (yes, I know it's blank now), and it's controlled by the system variable MODEMACRO.

According to Help, you can "use MODEMACRO to display a string of text, or use special text strings written in the DIESEL macro language to have the macro evaluated from time to time and base the status line on user-selected conditions."

That sounds kind of complicated, but it's really pretty simple. Re-wording it doesn't really help (I tried), so the best way to show you is with a couple of examples.

Here's how you would display a static message using MODEMACRO:
Before:

And after:

Pretty cool, huh? Although static messages are kind of boring, so how about one that uses a DIESEL expression to retrieve the current text style:

The image is small (although you can click on it to see the full-size version), so here's the input:

Style: $(getvar, textstyle)

The "Style: " part will always stay the same, but the DIESEL expression -- the part that starts with $ -- will update dynamically as you change the style.

You don't even have to stop there -- you can put together as many of these expressions as will fit in 255 characters. Just replace "textstyle" with your system variable of choice and "style" with some other descriptive word.

If any of my blog readers are using this in their setup, I'd love to hear about it -- drop me an e-mail with the link on the left.

Comments

[NeilJ]

LT does not remember the value of MODEMACRO when shut down - can MODEMACRO be amended via a startup file or something??

[Robin]

I use a script ";;GroupOnOff
modemacro $(getvar,pickstyle)"
which shows 0 or 1 according to whether Groups is off or on.
I have a button with "^C^C_script GroupOnOff.scr" in the quick Access menu that I hit each time I start Autocad with the following. Very useful.