Tactile productivity enhancer needed

[Anonymous]

It's clear that the developers are used to using their computers one-handed and did not put a high priority on the keyboard. But some of us have work to do.

It takes me significantly more time to model in Fusion 360 than Solidworks or Creo because I'm spending all my time navigating menus and looking for the sketch palette.

These more professional CAD tools have a very clever user interface feature which allows one to assign a keyboard key to a function in the program. One can map the most used functions to the keys under one hand and never have to look at the keyboard or menus for common tasks. (These more professional tools also have journal files that record your actions and clever bumpkins will data-mine that to check which functions they really use the most often when setting up their keyboard.)

The sad number of keyboard shortcuts, and the lack of custom keyboard shortcuts, makes me laugh at Fusion 360... until I have to use it. Then I cry.

How much longer will I have to wipe the tears off my keyboard? 

(PS I already map the shortcuts to my favorite keys using an external tool. But the shortcuts that are there are limited.)

[PinRudolf]

Custom keyboard shortcuts were announced on the roadmap and should be expected to be released soon. 

I quite like the idea of a self-learning shortcut menu based on your usage history, I'm not quit sure how it will look like though? Will the buttons not change position in the menu when I start using different functions more often (for example)? 

For now; maybe the Model Shortcut menu might be similar to what you are looking for? (Activate with key-S) This is fully customizable, very much like the SolidWorks shortcut menu. 

[Anonymous]

Self learning? No. A professional user interface is intentionally setup and trained on so that a command is a reflex rather than a visual servoing loop requiring hand-eye coordination. Training doesn't take long and is reinforced as you use it, but you still have to train. 

I think the process is the same with context menus, that one learns a bit of a reflex, so that having menus shift under you would kill productivity. 

It would be fine for the custom keyboard shortcut to show the statistics of what you use to help you choose. And you could use the stats to choose to retrain a different key set. 

This is what getting work done in CAD looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glSiSoAounY (That's a starcraft player but you get the point. Notice how the left hand is not moving to the other side of the keyboard.)  I have also used voice recognition for dimension and note entry, but that's harder to move from PC to PC when hot desking.

Thanks for the pointer about Model Shortcut. They left out sketch constraints which is sad.