Plugins Drop-Down Menu

[JBJDesigns]

Is there a plug-in (or script) for organizing all the plug-ins? Sounds funny, but when I want to use a plug-in from the drop-down menu tool bar "Plugins", I have to scroll up and down to find the right tool. Example: if I want to use the "Material Maintenance," I have to scroll down until I find it. Additional scrolling down to find and use the "Clean[sup:xvwoqexy]3[/sup:xvwoqexy]" tool, and then scroll back up to find the "DropGC." So you can see, there's a lot of scrolling going on and less productivity. And of course all the plug-ins that have tool bars are still listed in the drop-down menu. Any ideas? Help on this would be most appreciated. Jo Ann

[Rich O Brien]

You could create your own menu that contains the plugins in there.

Create an .rb file called ####whatever.rb and in it have the following...

$whateverSUBMENU=UI.menu("Plugins").add_submenu("Whatever")

Now target the plugins you want in the Whatever submenu and edit the .rb file where it calls the menu.

So if Acme.rb has...

UI.menu("Plugins").add_item("Acme")

...then you can change it to say...

$whateverSUBMENU.add_item("Acme")

Now under the Plugins menu you'll have a Whatever menu with Acme as a submenu.

Some plugins use different code to add the menu so make sure you copy the original file somewhere safe and then edit the copy.

Any updates to plugins will mean you need to edit them again but this is my hack to reduce Plugin menu length

[Aerilius]

The menus are indeed not very customizable. And all what plugins could do about it (better nothing) would be more hacky than manually editing the files.

One could either load less plugins from start (only on demand) or adopt to some toolbars. Unused toolbars can be hidden, whereas menus can't. there are also several custom toolbar plugins (Jim's, Rick's and mine).

The last resort if you can't find anything is a menu/toolbar search like LaunchUp.