Context menu RANT

ken

RANT start

Well, I am going though my plugin trying to find the plugin that are graying out the context menu.

Note, this not a complete list just what I found before I had to get back to work.

The "Select Only","Put on Layer" and "Proper Animation" seem especially sensitive to graying out. So I used these as my test context menu options. I also used as my test geometry a simple square. No groups or components or any rounded geometry.

A. JointPushPull affected All three. Wish there was a way to get this plugin to only be activated by toolbar.
B. Artisan affects, "Select Only", "Put on Layer" and "Construction Guide Tools"
C. FerrariSketch As above
D. Flattery affected "Put on Layer"

And the list goes on. What I have found that there does not seem to be a consistence repeatable error. It is my belief that the problems is exasperated by the type of geometry that is on the screen. "Select Only" and "Put on Layer" have a mind of their own. There doesn't seem to be a consistent error.

Note: I do not intent to say that the above plugins are causing my problems. To me this is way more complicated than a couple of rogue plugins. These are some plugins that I found I could remove and some of the problems are resolved. The problem may be me and the numerous plugins I have installed. It would be nice if all context menu plugins could be moved to either another menu or a toolbar. I never have trouble with any plugin that only uses the tool bar.

It is just damn tiring, to be immersed into finishing something, and having to stop save and re-open to see if that will cure the problem.

OK, now I feel better.

RANT over

thomthom

The problem is that SketchUp has a limit to how many commands, or menu items it can deal with. Too many and they start disabling. There was a set of Fredo's plugin's that caused a "leak", but it's all been addressed. Those that still see this issue usually have a high number of plugins installed which cause a high number of UI items, menus, toolbars etc to be loaded into SketchUp. There is no particular plugin that cause that, it's just the sheer number. But when people try to disable plugins looking for a correlation, they mistake it as the causation.

Until this matter is addressed by Google, as they are the only ones that can do anything about it, users have to be more selective about the plugins they have installed. Remove plugins you don't use, disable plugins you rarely use.

ken

thomthom

Reading your post, do you mean that even toolbar plugins will contribute to this problem? I have rewriting some context menu plugins, so that they are only accessed through a tool bar. I was hoping this would eliminate some of my problems.

Ken

thomthom

It's hard to tell. Only Google knows what goes on behind the scenes in their code. But the issue we had earlier was related to the number of UI::Command objects created. How it actually relates to toolbars and menu items without UI::Command object I do not know.

Bob James

@thomthom said:

Remove plugins you don't use, disable plugins you rarely use.

Thomas, do I understand you correctly: by "disable" do you mean just un-checking them in the View/Toolbar menu? Does this also refer to items checked in "Preferences" ?

This is a MAJOR annoyance/problem to my workflow. I'd love to have some way of easily bringing plugins in-and-out.

TIG

I think that to minimize the number of plugins that actually 'load' and thereby make 'commands' [which are the things that are causing this 'overload' until Google fix it ] you must disable some tool from loading completely at all. If a tools loads, but it's 'disabled' under the 'Extensions' por even the 'Toolbar' settings] it could still add 'commands' to Sketchup... so that will ultimately add to the total - disafortunamente ...

So you do need to disable these tools completely... that is, by renaming the .rb file that is loading the tool from the Plugins folder with an additional .TXT suffix: so then it won't auto-load as Sketchup starts... BUT later on, if you decide it's needed, you can always load it for that session only, by using load 'script.rb.TXT' in the Ruby Console...

Hopefully some future improvements in Plugin Management will make all of this much easier