I do not wear the "Old School" badge because I am drowning in nostalgia. I wear it because I learned to draft when the screen was black, the text was green, and the mouse was often just a paperweight. I cut my teeth on AutoCAD back when it lived on MS-DOS and Unix systems. It was a raw, unforgiving environment, and it was fast. We did not hunt for cute little pictures of what we wanted to do. We typed commands. We hammered the keyboard. We used the sidebar menu. We worked at the speed of thought, not the speed of a cursor drifting across a sea of icons.
When the Windows version eventually landed, the ground shifted. The sidebar vanished and was replaced by rows of gray buttons. The toolbars had arrived. I grumbled. We all did. But I adapted. The toolbars were static. They sat exactly where you put them and never moved. You could memorize the location of a button like you memorize the fretboard of a guitar. My hand learned the distance, my eyes stayed on the geometry, and I became a wizard of the toolbar interface.
Then the industry lost its mind and gave us the Ribbon.
I turned it off immediately. I still turn it off. The very first thing I do on any fresh install is hunt down the variable to kill that ribbon and reclaim my monitor. In CAD, the drawing area is sacred ground. Every pixel of that black void belongs to the geometry, not to a bloated UI panel that thinks it knows better than I do. The Ribbon squats at the top of the screen like a landlord. It eats up vertical space and forces me to pan and zoom when I should not have to.
Speaking of the void, we need to talk about the background color. Modern AutoCAD installs do not give you black anymore. They give you a murky, apologetic dark grey. It looks like a chalkboard that has not been washed in a week. It offends me. The moment the Ribbon is dead, I dive into the display settings and scorch the earth. I do not want the "dark theme." I want the abyss. I set the 2D model space, 3D parallel, and perspective modes to pure 0,0,0 black. When I stare into the monitor, I want to see the lines and absolutely nothing else.
I do not stop at the background. I ruthlessly hide every single default toolbar Autodesk ships with the software. My screen is not a billboard for features I do not use. Once the slate is clean, I fire up my personal plugin. I wrote this tool to bypass the generic migration settings and force the system to behave. It summons exactly four custom toolbars. One anchors North, one South, one East, and one West. They frame the drawing area like the crosshairs of a scope. These are not generic buttons. They are the heavy hitters, the custom routines I built to save myself from typing the longest strings. Four bars. The rest is the Void. If I need something obscure, I go to the menu bar. Otherwise, the screen belongs to the model.
Once the visual noise is dead, I attack the input methods. I turn on Dynamic Input with AutoComplete instantly. This might sound contradictory for a command-line junkie, but it is actually the ultimate evolution of it. It brings the prompt to the cursor. I do not have to look down at the bottom of the screen. The machine listens to me right where I am working.
But I do not stop at simply turning it on. I rig the deck. I refuse to accept the default prediction logic. I hunt down the AcCommandWeight.xml file, a text file that controls the brain of the autocomplete system, and I edit the weights manually. By default, the system sees "C" and thinks "CIRCLE." That is wrong. When I type "C," I want "COPY." So I force "COPY" to the top of the stack. I ensure "CIRCLE" sits in second place, and I make sure "CAL" stays out of my way. I do not let the software guess what I want. I tell it what I am going to want.
And I make sure it listens to the real commands. I open the acad.pgp file, the holy scroll of shortcuts, and I gut it. I comment out nearly everything. I do not want L to mean Line unless I say so. I want to type the command names. I want the purity of the language. I keep a tiny handful of personal aliases, but otherwise, I wipe the slate clean. It forces a deliberate interaction with the software that the hunt-and-peck crowd will never understand.
My plugin handles most of this heavy lifting now, but I still have to tweak things manually here and there. As I get deeper into .NET development, I will eventually automate the rest of it. I want a single button that transforms a fresh install into my personal dojo in seconds.
Some people might look at this setup and think I need an intervention. They might be right. I am addicted to customization. I cannot leave well enough alone. I am a perfectionist, and even the Windows operating system must bend the knee. The taskbar must be on the side, so I use Windhawk to force it there. The desktop right-click menu is a mess, so I use NileSoft Shell to rewrite it.
It goes deeper. I have custom Middle Mouse Button menus that act as my personal command center. I use them as application launchers. I use them to change text case, wrap strings, insert timestamps, and drop in special symbols. I know I am crazy. I know that if anyone else sat at my workstation, they would be completely lost. They would stare at the screen and not know how to open a web browser. I cannot help myself.
To be honest, the only rope tying me to the Windows operating system is AutoCAD (and other 3D modeling apps). If Autodesk ever decided to release a native version for Unix or Linux, I would format my hard drive that afternoon. I would wash my hands of the Ribbon, the grey backgrounds, and the user-friendly chaos, and go back to a system that respects the command line as much as I do.