[Bricksmith] Tip to add more view columns

[Jim DeVona]

You can add more columns of views to the Bricksmith window by option-clicking the splitter button the normally adds new views to the same column. Button highlighted below.



Just thought I'd share since I'm not sure if this is documented anywhere obvious.

[Jean-Philippe Ouellet]

Awesome. I had concluded that this was not possible. Thank you very much.

I just checked the Bricksmith tutorial/"secret keyboard shortcuts" (the only documentation for Bricksmith (besides the source) of which I am aware) and I see no mention of the behavior you described. Nice find.

[Allen Smith]

What, you didn't memorize every word of my release announcements over the years?!!! Scandalous! Those things rival Shakespeare in their poetic grace.
http://news.lugnet.com/announce/?n=4022

Actually, this isn't entirely undocumented or undiscoverable: if you hover the mouse over the split button, a tooltip pops up telling you to option-click for a new column.

That said, if anyone wishes to produce better help documentation to ship with Bricksmith, I would gladly integrate it. The Tutorial I ship was a submission from a friendly user. I am not a good technical writer, and I do not have enough time to do so anyway, so I am largely at the mercy of others here.

Allen

[Roland Melkert]

You probably already know, but most people don't bother with a manual anyway.

[Travis Cobbs]

I can agree with that. LDView's manual is fairly comprehensive (if not very pretty), and I frequently get questions that are answered in it.

[Jim DeVona]

What, you didn't memorize every word of my release announcements over the years?!!! Scandalous! Those things rival Shakespeare in their poetic grace.
http://news.lugnet.com/announce/?n=4022

Ah, seeing that I replied to that announcement probably explains how I learned about the feature.

Actually, this isn't entirely undocumented or undiscoverable: if you hover the mouse over the split button, a tooltip pops up telling you to option-click for a new column.

That seems like a reasonable level of discoverability, actually - someone poking around at all the widgets would probably find that eventually.

[Jean-Philippe Ouellet]

Still, I'd rather learn something by reading it rather than devoting large amounts of time to trial and error which may (and will probably) leave gaps in my knoledge.

I've added compiling bricksmith documentation to my mental to-do list... if I ever get there.

[Lauren]

Oh my god, I want to cry. Thank you for posting this. I've been using bricksmith for only a few weeks, and I figured the vertical split out once, then didn't open bricksmith for a week, and couldn't remember how to reopen them after searching the entire manual and googling for literally days. Thank you. I could only remember the tiny (and sometimes hidden due to ui bug) button to split horizontally, but that was not enough for me to remember that I needed to hover and wait for the tool tip, then interpret the second line properly.

If I ever get a spare sec, I'll see if there's somewhere I can submit an update to the doc. Probably not the UI (a menu option or an icon would be glorious), I know nothing about dev for mac native apps.

I registered just to thank you. I finally found this link after googling one last time because my workarounds of layering open instances were getting a little out of control.