Adjusting Your AutoCAD User Interface Visual Options: A Step-by-Step Guide

At this point, you may have noticed that your user interface looks slightly different than mine. You may have a different color scheme, or your crosshairs might be visually different.

This is okay. We will now cover the visual options to ensure that our user interfaces match for the rest of this course. To begin, I'm going to go back to the application button and find the options button, and here is my options window.

You will notice that there are different tabs in the options dialog box, and we will go left to right through every tab. So let's start at the files tab. We won't be changing anything in this tab, but I want to point out this is where you change different file types and locations if you want to customize your experience.

This will help with templates, color table files, and other more advanced AutoCAD file type options. We do not need to change anything for this course. Display.

First, let's start with the window elements. In AutoCAD, there are two color themes, light and dark. I am going to choose the dark option, hit apply, and you will see that this changes my user interface elements to a dark color with white text.

I think this is easier to see, especially when modeling long hours. The rest of the window elements you can look through on your own, except I would like to go to colors. The colors are influenced by the color theme, and we can see different context elements here.

Also, there's a preview of these elements at the bottom of the screen. Of course, we want a nice dark background while modeling in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD applies this new color 334048 for the drawing background. We can leave that, or if you'd prefer, you can choose black, the historic AutoCAD background color.

I will leave it as this color for now. When I go to sheet layout, you will notice that the default is a white layout. In this course, I would like to change our sheets to also be a dark color, so I will change that to the same color, 334048.

Over here on the paper background, we can see that this color is 138138138, and this is the color that surrounds our piece of paper. We can leave this as is. One other change we need to do is to the crosshairs.

Because the sheet used to be white, the crosshairs for paper space are automatically black. Now that we've changed the uniform background to the dark gray color, we should change our crosshairs to be white. I'm going to go back to 2D model space, and please feel free to explore the other interface elements if you would like to change a color.

The default crosshairs color is white. The grid major lines and minor lines are dark gray, and there are many other options. I do not need to change any other options at this point.

I will hit apply and close, and next let's look at our crosshair size. The default crosshair size for AutoCAD is not all the way across the screen. However, I prefer expanding the crosshair size to the full width and full height of the screen.

It helps me organize my model by showing me how things align across the screen, both vertically and horizontally. So for me, my preference is to move the crosshair size all the way up. You may choose what feels comfortable for you, although I would suggest if you do not have a preference to use crosshair size 100.

You can type it in or slide the slider. Next on open and save, this is where AutoCAD defines auto save preferences, number of files in your recently used file display window, and most importantly the file save as drawing year. This drawing year is not updated every single year, but instead every three to five years.

AutoCAD 2018 is the most recent version, so I will choose AutoCAD 2018 as my file type. If your version of AutoCAD or a version of AutoCAD you might be working with is earlier than 2018, you may want to choose the 2013 file type. Plot and publish is where you will see your printer connections.

I am connected to a printer, but in this case I will choose DWG to PDF as my default printer. These days I print much more often to PDF first and then print the PDFs to my printers. We do not need to change anything by default in system, although if you are working on an older computer or a less powerful computer, you may want to check your graphics performance under hardware acceleration.

This is turned on by default and it will visualize AutoCAD with smoother transitions. If you notice that AutoCAD is lagging or running slowly, you may want to come into this window and see if you can change your graphics performance settings. User preferences, this is where your mouse and keyboard preferences are located.

For our mouse and keyboard, we will use the default AutoCAD settings, although you may want to check your insertion scale, not in this course but in future projects, in case you bring in drawings that you did not create or created earlier with different units. In the drafting window, we will see two very important settings, our auto snap marker size and aperture size. The aperture size is in between your crosshairs and it will be important to have a correct aperture size for your preference.

A large aperture will allow you to pick click objects very easily and a small aperture allows you to draw easier windows. It is excellent to find a middle ground that works for you. In the auto snap marker size, we will cover auto snaps later in this course, I will make mine a little extra large so that you can see them in the video.

We will not do any 3D modeling in this course. Under selection, the pick box size is similar to aperture. Again, I will find a middle ground and the grip size is similar.

I will make that around the middle. Again, it will be easier for you to see in the video. The first checkbox in selection modes allows me to introduce a very important topic, noun verb selection.

In AutoCAD, you may select your objects first and then apply a verb or an action item. In AutoCAD, those are represented as the modify tools. Noun verb selection allows you to select your objects first and then activate a modifier tool.

Historically, the requirement was to do verb noun only, which means you would have had to activate your modify tool first, then create your selection set, and then complete the modify command workflow. With this checkbox on, we are now able to pre-select our objects on the screen and then activate and execute our modify command. Please make sure that this checkbox is checked.

Finally, in the top right, there are profiles. And again, this is slightly higher level than this course, although if you are working in an office, they might use profiles. Please ask your co-workers if they use profiles in the office.

I will hit apply and okay. And the last thing I would like to modify is our status bar in the bottom right. I will go back to these three lines, which is the hamburger, and click.

And here I want to turn off the objects I will not be using in this course. We will not be needing to see coordinates, grid, snap mode. I will leave dynamic input visually on, but please make sure that it is physically off.

We do not want dynamic input active. We want ortho, polar, and isometric on. Object snap tracking and 2D object snap are on.

Line weight and transparency could be on. However, those are often represented here in the properties panel. We will not be using selection cycling, 3D object snap, dynamic UCS, selection filtering, or gizmo in this course.

I will turn off workspace switching, annotation monitor, units, and isolate objects. Now that we have a simplified status bar, we are ready to begin modeling. I am excited to start in the next video.