2012: Mouse Gestures that Save Time

I must confess, ever since mouse gestures were introduced a couple of years ago, I haven’t been using them.  The truth is that I’m too hooked on keyboard shortcuts.  Why try to do everything with your right hand when your right (on the mouse) and left hand (on the keyboard) can work together in perfect harmony?  Not only that, but you also had to memorize exactly where each mouse gesture command resided in each of the modeling states (Part, Assembly, and Drawing).  Much too hard for my scrambled mind to manage.

Well, SOLIDWORKS 2012 SP0 (which was officially released earlier this week) has introduced an enhancement that will probably fly under most peoples’ radars, but it will finally get me using mouse gestures on a daily, hourly, minutely, and even secondly basis.  The enhancement is simple – you can now assign the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ commands as mouse gestures (you also now have the ability to assign custom macros to gestures).  The ‘OK’ command as a mouse gestures saves me from stumbling my left hand all the way across my keyboard to the ‘Enter’ key which may or may not have been recognized as the ‘OK’ shortcut.

This enhancement is too great to be overlooked.  If mouse gestures were too much trouble for you to use in the past, try giving my ultra-simplistic mouse gesture mapping a try in 2012.