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When you use any tool for a while you often build a more per­son­al con­nec­tion to it. Per­haps you have that old screw­driv­er in a draw­er that’s become pol­ished with years of use and fits your hand per­fect­ly. We’ve looked pre­vi­ous­ly at chang­ing the appear­ance of FreeCAD using themes and also dif­fer­ent work­bench list­ing options as a method of per­son­al­is­ing our FreeCAD, in this tuto­r­i­al though we’ll look at tool­bars and tool icons.

So all work­bench­es have their own col­lec­tion of tools arranged into tool­bar groups. One of the fun­da­men­tal things to know is that you can left click on the 3 dots at the edge of a tool­bar and you can then drag the entire tool­bar to anoth­er posi­tion and can also drag it to an auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed new tool­bar line.

You can also nav­i­gate to view – Tool­bars and you will see a tick list of tool­bars that are avail­able for the par­tic­u­lar work­bench you are in. You can then show or hide these tool­bars by check­ing or un-check­ing them in the list. Notice that this list changes as you access it from dif­fer­ent workbenches.

It’s also pos­si­ble to cre­ate your own cus­tom tool­bars which can fea­ture any tool from any of the built in FreeCAD work­bench­es, these cus­tom tool­bars can be added to any work­bench­es you like or even be added glob­al­ly to all workbenches.

For exam­ple, lets cre­ate a cus­tom tool­bar that will include the export func­tion, the export to PDF func­tion and the icon to launch the Addon man­ag­er. From the Part Work­bench click tools – Cus­tomize. In the result­ing win­dow click the “Tool­bars” tab from the avail­able selec­tion. You’ll see on the left hand side that an area pop­u­lates with tools, icons and com­mands that you can choose from. There is a drop down menu titled “Cat­e­go­ry” and you can use this to jump to col­lat­ed selec­tions of tools. These cat­e­gories can either be sec­tions of FreeCAD like the “File” menu etc or they can be a workbench.

On the right hand side of the win­dow click the “New” but­ton to cre­ate your new cus­tom tool­bar. You can give it a recog­nis­able name, or leave it as the default “Cus­tom 1”. With your new tool­bar cre­at­ed you then scroll through, or use the search func­tion on the right hand side to iden­ti­fy the tool or com­mand you want to add to your cus­tom tool­bar. With the tool high­light­ed you then click the arrow point right to add the cur­rent­ly select­ed tool over into your new tool­bar. We added the export func­tion, the export to pdf func­tion and the icon to launch the Addon man­ag­er. When you are hap­py with the con­tents of your cus­tom tool­bar click close. You may need to reload the Part Design work­bench by mov­ing to anoth­er work­bench and then return­ing to Part Design but then you should see your cus­tom tool­bar. Note that on oth­er work­bench­es this tool­bar will not be shown, but it will appear in the view – Tool­bars list we men­tioned ear­li­er so can be added to oth­er workbenches.

If you want to cre­ate a cus­tom tool­bar that appears by default on every work­bench as you use FreeCAD you can eas­i­ly do so. Once again click tools – Customize from the Part Design work­bench. In the result­ing win­dow click the “Tool­bars” tab from the avail­able selec­tion. This time on the right hand side click the drop­down that cur­rent­ly reads “Part Design” (or your cur­rent­ly select­ed work­bench) and then select “Glob­al” from the list. Now when you cre­ate your cus­tom tool­bar it will auto­mat­i­cal­ly appear through­out FreeCAD.