FreeCAD News

With the arrival of ver­sion 1.0 it’s a good time to take a look at some of the basic appear­ance options avail­able to adjust to our pref­er­ences. So let’s look at the basics of switch­ing themes and chang­ing the list­ing and appear­ance of work­bench­es in FreeCAD.

If we launch FreeCAD and then nav­i­gate to Edit-Pref­er­ences we will land on the main “Gen­er­al” tab. On the Gen­er­al tab we should find a box labelled “Appli­ca­tion” and the top item in this box is “Theme”. There is a drop down menu next to “Theme:” and in a default new instal­la­tion FreeCAD ver­sion 1.0 comes with 3 themes, FreeCAD Clas­sic, FreeCAD Dark and FreeCAD Light.

Rather nice­ly if you swap theme using the drop down menu you can click the “Apply” but­ton at the bot­tom of the Pref­er­ences page and you will switch into the new theme with­out hav­ing to close the win­dow or restart­ing FreeCAD so it’s easy to have a look at, and choose, from the built in themes.

If you are new to FreeCAD you’ll prob­a­bly have learnt that FreeCAD works using a range of dif­fer­ent work­bench­es. This saves clut­ter in terms of hav­ing relat­ed groups of tools col­lect­ed into a work­bench and we can switch near instant­ly between work­bench­es bring­ing our work to the new col­lec­tion of tools. As we use and learn FreeCAD we all tend to have some work­bench­es we use reg­u­lar­ly and oth­ers we use rarely and some we may nev­er even explore. You may also know that we can add on addi­tion­al work­bench­es which are devel­oped and con­tributed by our bril­liant com­mu­ni­ty. As such, it’s like­ly that after some time learn­ing and using FreeCAD you might want to edit your work­bench list and appearance.

Again, in the pref­er­ences pan­el, move to the “Work­bench­es” tab which appears in the list on the left hand side. In the work­bench­es dia­logue there is a list of all the work­bench­es you have installed in your FreeCAD set­up. This will include any work­bench­es you have added using the Addon man­ag­er. You can sim­ply check or uncheck work­bench items in this list and that will tog­gle their vis­i­bil­i­ty in the default work­bench drop down com­bo box. Notice that you can also left click over a work­bench list­ing and then drag it up or down in the list chang­ing the order in which the work­bench­es appear in the list. You can, at any time, right click on any work­bench list item and select “sort alpha­bet­i­cal­ly” to arrange the list in alpha­bet­ic order.

Final­ly you can also switch between “Com­boBox” and “Tab­Bar” in the “Work­bench selec­tor type” drop down. By default this is set to “Com­boBox” which shows the work­bench as a drop­down list. If you select “Tab­Bar” and click apply and then “OK” the pref­er­ences tab will close and you will be prompt­ed to restart FreeCAD. Once restart­ed you should see that your work­bench list now appears as a col­lec­tion of tabs across the top of the screen. This can pro­vide a quick way to jump between com­mon­ly used workbenches.

We’ve only real­ly scratched the sur­face in this mini tuto­r­i­al, there are many ways to cus­tomise the appear­ance of FreeCAD, it’s worth look­ing through the forum, and explor­ing com­mu­ni­ty con­tributed style sheets and themes in the Addon man­ag­er.