“S”-Key option

One of my favorite enhancements to the recent versions of SolidWorks is the use of the “S”-key. By simply pressing the “S”-key on your keyboard, you can launch a little toolbar that contains all of your favorite commands. This dramatically cuts down on mouse travel and can really help you finish your design faster. I have discussed this awesome shortcut at length in some of my tech tip videos on YouTube.

Yesterday, while teaching, I discovered something interesting about the “S”-key shortcut in SolidWorks. If you use the “S” key in 2012, SolidWorks will bring up the shortcut menu as expected. It will also activate the search field at the top of the window (upper right search area in the SolidWorks user interface). If you hit any keys after that, it will start populating the search field. This was confusing for me, and I wasn’t sure if you could turn off this function.

Turns out you can. If you go into TOOLS>CUSTOMIZE you will see the options shown below. Turn off the “Activate Command Search…” option under Shortcut Bar, and the search field will no longer activate when you hit the “S”-key.

Questions? Comments? As always, I look forward to hearing any questions or comments on this topic. Please feel free to post comments below, or to email me at SWTech@prismeng.com. Thanks for taking a look at today’s blog, and I hope you found the info useful.

Take care, ~Toby Schnaars