Twitter Tip of the Day: Multi-Functional Grips

This morning on Twitter, Brian Benton (@bcbenton) asked “In #AutoCAD 2011, when selecting a Polyline, can the "Stretch, Add Convert" box be turned off temporarily?”

A few minutes later, he answered his own question (albeit on Facebook): “GRIPMULTIFUNCTIONAL set to 0 or 1.”

Rather than leave it there, though, I thought I’d expand on the other options for this particular system variable.

GRIPMULTIFUNCTIONAL can actually be set to 0, 1, 2, or 3. (The default is 3.)

1. Access to multi-functional grips is disabled. With this setting, you lose any object-specific grip functions, and can only use the standard Stretch/Move/Rotate/Scale/Mirror.
2. Access multi-functional grips with Ctrl-cycling and the Hot Grip shortcut menu. This means that you have to left-click on a grip first, then either press Ctrl to cycle through the options or right-click to pick one from a shortcut menu.
3. Access multi-functional grips with the dynamic menu and the Hot Grip shortcut menu. With this value, you can either hover over a grip before clicking to see the menu and pick an option, or you can left-click on a grip and then right-click to bring up the shortcut menu. Pressing Ctrl with an active grip has no effect.
4. Access multi-functional grips with Ctrl-cycling, the dynamic menu, and the Hot Grip shortcut menu. Provides the most options for accessing multi-functional options. Hover over a grip to pick from the dynamic menu, left-click a grip and press Ctrl to cycle, or left-click a grip and right-click for a shortcut menu.

I’m really not sure why anyone would choose 0 (multi-functional grips are great!) or 2 (leaving Ctrl-cycling on doesn’t really hurt anything, does it?), but you could use 1 if you really don’t like pop-up menus.

Comments

[Brian Benton]

Thanks Kate for the post. I love this new feature in AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011, but had a special circumstance where we ere literally creating polylines of a large island chain! Some of them were splines and some were polylines. It seemed the new feature was slowing my workstation's performance. I turned it off and that helped. But now I have it back on and am loving it!

I "knew" there had to be a way to turn it off. Everything in AutoCAD has a setting, you just have to know the system variable for it.