There is history where plugins have been collected and packaged, without the owners’ permissions, and distributed with a “collection toolbar”. When I write an extension with multiple commands, I like to expose them in a collection called “Commands” (usually a hash with the command name as the key.)īut the authors of some commercial extensions do not do this, and may not want any other extension calling their commands. Such standards have been proposed but everyone just has their own style, and it is like pulling teeth to get everyone to agree on one single standard. Sounds simple, but in practice it is not. But first, you need to get all the extension programmers to adhere to some standard, when it comes to writing their UI interfaces. Seems like it should be really simple if you just know the Ruby command for it. (A method is known as a function or procedure in other languages.) If the original programmer just enclosed the plugin command code in the block for the add_item() method, then there is no way to execute that code other than clicking the menu item.īut a better form of coding would be to enclose the command’s code within a named method, and the menu item block or the UI::Command block simply calls that named method. After the creation code ends (ie, goes out of scope,) there is no longer any way (via the SketchUp Ruby APIs) for the original programmer, any other programmer or plugin, to get a reference to these menu items. There are older quick and dirty ways to create a menu item, that does not create a lasting interface. And one orchard is off limits.Īs I tried to explain above, menu items can be, but do not have to be, exposed as Ruby UI::Command objects.

So it is not really that they are like apples and oranges, … but rather they are both apples, but in different orchards. (And not everything about the UI has been exposed to the APIs.) The native Shortcuts panel (of the Preferences dialog,) enumerates menus and the items on them, on the native (C++) side of the code.Īerilius’ Toolbar Editor is a Ruby extension, which is limited to using only whatever has been exposed to Ruby, by the SketchUp development team. … because it has created a native C++ menu item. Now, if I can set a hotkey of Ctrl+R for the plugin Repeat Copy

Toolbar editor sketchup