AutoCAD Tips & Tutorials

Use the Shift key as a shortcut

You can use the Shift key in AutoCAD in many ways to help make your AutoCAD tasks easier and quicker:

• Press Shift with the FILLET or CHAMFER command to change the radius to 0 and extend to lines to meet
• Press and hold Shift to temporarily override ORTHO.
• Press and hold Shift+A to temporarily override OSNAP.
• Press Shift to change TRIM to EXTEND and vice versa.
• Press Shift and pick objects to remove them from the current selection set. You can also press Shift and click a window or crossing selection.
• If you have several objects that overlap at a point, mouse over that point, press Shift and press the Spacebar repeatedly to cycle through these objects

• In the AutoCAD Text window (press F2 to open and close it), press SHIFT with a key to highlight text. For example, press Shift + Home to highlight text from the cursor to the beginning of the line. Or press Shift + the Up arrow to select the previous line of prompts.

Here are all the keyboard shortcuts I could find in AutoCAD's Help that use Shift:

• SHIFT+, Object Snap Override: Center
• SHIFT+. Toggles Polar Tracking
• SHIFT+/ Toggles UCSDETECT
• SHIFT+; Enables Object Snap Enforcement
• SHIFT+] Toggles Object Snap Tracking
• SHIFT+C Object Snap Override: Center
• SHIFT+D Disable All Snapping and Tracking
• SHIFT+E Object Snap Override: Endpoint
• SHIFT+L Disable All Snapping and Tracking
• SHIFT+M Object Snap Override: Midpoint
• SHIFT+P Object Snap Override: Endpoint
• SHIFT+Q Toggles Object Snap Tracking
• SHIFT+S Enables Object Snap Enforcement
• SHIFT+V Object Snap Override: Midpoint
• SHIFT+X Toggles Polar Tracking
• SHIFT+Z Toggles UCSDETECT

Do you know of another Shift tip? Let me know and I'll post it.

Several people (Kent Elrod, Edwin Prakoso, Jon Groelz, W.S.Walker, Hans Graveman, Kevin Schaefer) mentioned Shift + right mouse button to display the OSNAP menu. Of course! That was probably the first Shift shortcut I ever used!

Several people (Kent Elrod, Edwin Prakoso, W.S.Walker, Susan Lafleur) mentioned Shift + middle mouse button (usually the scroll wheel) to transparently go into 3D orbit. Another good one! I use that a lot when I'm working in 3D.

Several people (Kent Elrod, Rusty Gesner, Gary Ketter) mentioned pressing Shift and clicking multiple grips, to select them.

Bill Northrup mentioned two great ones, which work well together:

• Ctrl+Shift+C: This is the COPYBASE command. It copies a selected object, prompting you for the base point.
• Ctrl+Shift+V: This is the PASTEBLOCK command. It pastes an object that you copied to the clipboard as a block. (AutoCAD assigns it a name.)

A couple of people noted that you can set AutoCAD (on the Drafting tab of the Options dialog box) to require pressing the Shift key to acquire a point for tracking; it's not the default setting, though. As a matter of fact, you can set AutoCAD (on the Selection tab of the Options dialog box) to require pressing the Shift key to select more than one object at a time (the way you do in most other programs).

Marti Broquetas mentioned a blog post he had done a while back on the same topic, called "Things Shift Can Do For You." His blog is CAD.Addict.

Related Tips:

• Keyboard shortcuts
• Create a custom keyboard shortcut
• Create a command alias

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