Drawing Effeciently With Shortcuts

The idea is to minimize the distance your hands need to travel while selecting the most common tools you use.

Keep your right hand on the mouse. The only exception is entering values in the VCB. (You are right-handed, aren't you?)

Your left hand should be confined to the left-half of the keyboard, pinky on the shift key. I suggest these shortcuts:

• Shift-space => Pencil Tool
• h => Edit/Hide
  
• Shift-H => Edit/Unhide/All
  
• g => Make Group
  
• Shift-G => Make Component
• Shift-C => Toggle Components Window
  
• Shift-E => Erase Guidelines (construction geometry)
• Shift-A => Protractor Tool (think A for Angle)
• Shift-S => PushPull Tool
• Shift-Z => Zoom Extents (I use zoom_selection.rb, a custom zoom tool.)
  
• Shift-F => FollowMe Tool
• d => Edit/Delete
• x => Explode
• Alt-1 => ISO View
• Alt-2 => Top View
• Alt-3 => Front View

I have tried other combinations, but I keep coming back to these.

You can import these directly into SketchUp by downloading Preferences.dat

Zoom Selection

Zoom Selection is a ruby plugin for SketchUp 6 that will perform a Zoom Extents on all the selected entities or, if nothing is selected, perform a Zoom Extents on the entire model. I use the 'z' to zoom to the selection's extents, and Shift-Z to zoom to the model extents.

Download zoom_selection.rb

Installation:
Copy or move the zoom_selection.rb file into the Sketchup Plugins directory. Restart SketchUp.