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AutoCAD Productivity

To or From the Current Layer

by Michael Beall

From: AutoCAD Productivity Articles #133
Originally published: April 2014

There are two really handy buttons on the Layers panel—Make Object's Layer Current and Change to Current Layer.

Make Object's Layer Current

Make currentUse this command to set the current layer by selecting an object that's on the layer you want to be current.

Ex: You just added the topographic lines to the site plan on the TOPO layer, and now you need to add more notes to the NOTES layer. Click Make Object's Layer Current, click on some text that's on the NOTES layer, and that becomes the current layer.

Change to Current Layer

Change to currentThis is a great editing feature when you need to move objects from one layer to another.

Ex: The NOTES layer is current as you add text to the drawing and discover text objects that are a different color. So you hover over the object to display the rollover tip where you see it's on the wrong layer. Click Change to Current Layer, then select the errant objects and press [Enter] to change them over to the NOTES layer that happens to be current.

See all the articles published in April 2014

Michael's Corner

Between 2003 and 2016, Michael Beall (and one or two guests) wrote almost 600 articles for CADTutor. The focus of these articles is AutoCAD productivity, and although some of them are now more than a few years old, most remain relevant to current versions of AutoCAD. The article above is just one example. Check out Michael's Corner for a full listing.

Tip of the Day

Auto-repeating Commands

Editing the Circle macro in the CUISometimes you need to repeat a command lots of times and it can be a bit tedious doing the usual Right-Click and Repeat… or even using the Enter key on the keyboard. It would be really useful if you could just keep a command auto-repeating until you hit the Escape key Esc. Well, you can. All you need to do is make a small change to the CUI.

For example, say you want to draw lots of circles and have the circle command auto-repeat so that you can just pick center, radius, center, radius etc. Here's what you do:

  1. Select View ❯ Toolbars… from the pull-down menu to display the CUI dialogue box.
  2. In the "Customizations in All CUI Files" section, click on "Toolbars" and then "Draw" to reveal the Draw commands, and then click "Circle".
  3. The Properties area now changes to display the Circle button properties and under the "Macro" heading, you will see the macro used to start the Circle command. By default, this macro is: ^C^C_circle. To cause the Circle command to auto-repeat, simply add a "*" before the existing macro. Once edited, your macro should look like this: *^C^C_circle.
  4. Now click the "OK" button to save and return to the drawing.

Try the circle command and see what happens.

This technique can be used with most commands. For example, if you are doing a lot of dimensioning, you could auto-repeat the Linear Dimension command so that you can draw all your dimensions without breaking stride.

Today's tip is by fuccaro

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