AutoCAD 2006 TAB to see "MY" custom programs

This last week I've been attempting to learn some basic VBA skills. Well I developed a couple simple programs for our office and prior to deploying them out to our users I stepped back and thought "How are our users remembering all the codes?" We have nearly 200 lisp codes that our users use throughout the week. I'm sure there are company's out there who have a ton more, who use nothing but Lisp, VBA, ARX, what ever programing language you prefer. But I was interested in how everyone is remembering all these names? Well I asked around to some people who I've talked to from Forums and many say, Toolbars, Toolpalettes, Menu Pulldowns through the CUI, or just writing up some good documentation. I think all of those are great!! But I wanted this time to try a new method. Well I remembered that AutoCAD 2006 introduced the TAB feature at the command line to cycle through command names. Which comes really in handy especially when you forget what a command name is. Or you can remember what the command name starts with but cant remember the rest. Anyways, I decided that this time I would name my codes a little differently. I decided to append "MY" to the beginning of the code. Why you ask? Well by naming my code with MY before anything will allow the users to TAB through ONLY "MY" custom codes (Except MYDOCUMENTSPREFIX). So there is no more cycling through a bunch of Standard commands when you're looking for a company code. Now I'm not saying you need to append MY to every code. But for the specialty codes that aren't used everyday this has come in real handy for our users to quickly find our company codes. So just wanted to share with everyone because this little method might end up working out for your office as well. Some other ideas you could append instead of MY is an abbreviation of your company name? Ours for example, MKMLAYERS, MKMBEAM what ever it is.

Comments

[Mike Weaver]

Great idea. I think I'll implement that with the following addition. Create an alias to the original routine. For example, my users have a routine "WS" for drawing weld symbols. If I create an alias GEM_WS that simply runs the original WS procedure then they can access it by tabbing through all the GEM procedures and the GEM_WS name reminds them of the shorter WS name.

Thanks

[Donald Boyer]

What are we talking about here? TAB at the Command line? Do I type in TAB? Right click for TAB? I went into Help to try and find help on TAB but it doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank You

[Mark Douglas]

If you type in the beginning of a command on your command line such as LI or L then hit your TAB button on your keyboard you will start to see every command that starts with L or LI spool through your command line. Its just a way to quickly search for command names. Hope this explains it a little more.