Sixteen tools, six sections

I counted them off the palette this week: sixteen commands, in one dockable panel, sorted into six sections. Crosswalk. Parking. Traffic. Geometry. Site. Survey. Before this palette existed, those sixteen were sixteen separate plugins, each loaded on its own, each easy to forget I even had.

That is the part worth saying plainly. The palette does not save you from memorizing sixteen command names. It saves you from having to remember that sixteen tools exist at all. You do not need to know that one crosswalk command opens a dialog and the other does not. You need to know you are laying out a curb return, and the Crosswalk section is right there.

A tool nobody remembers exists might as well not have been built. I know this because it happened to me. More than one of these sixteen sat unused for weeks at a time, not because it stopped working, but because I forgot to open that project and load it. The tool was fine. My memory of its existence was not.

Grouping by the kind of work, not by command name, is what actually fixes that. Nobody opens a palette looking for a specific circle-drawing macro by name. They open it because they are drawing a fillet, and they already know that is a geometry problem. The section header does the remembering that used to be mine to do.

Sixteen is not a small number to carry around in your head, project to project, year to year. Six sections is. That is the actual trade this palette makes, and it turned out to be a better trade than the one I set out to build.

Be Better - sort it so you do not have to remember it.