Good Question: Palette Sensitivity

Today's good question comes from Bill. He asked this question during my AutoCAD Tips & Tricks session in Calgary and, although I didn't know the answer, I knew someone that did!

Bill asked if you can control the sensitivity of Auto-hide for palettes. He wanted the palettes to be less sensitive when hidden so he wouldn't accidentally activate the wrong one, and more sensitive when open so they would disappear immediately.

This is just one of the many "wicked cool" tricks you can learn from Matt Murphy's Tool Palettes class at CAD Camp or Autodesk University.

The following comes from Matt Murphy (Top Autodesk University 2006 Speaker):

The timer settings for rollup, rollout, the new "roll out then rollup" (called "holdopen") are stored in the fixed profile XML file. By default these settings are not specified. You can add these settings to the file by editing it to provide non-default values for each of these behaviors.

1. To make the changes first back up the "FixedProfile.aws" file in your support/Profiles directory and then edit it using any text editor. I use Windows Notepad. Remember there is a distinctive fixed profile based on user login name of your Windows operating system.
   
2. When you open the file it will be hard to read because it is not well formatted, but the changes to make are near the top of the file.
   
3. Search for the word "<AcApData>" (should be right at the top).
   
4. Immediately after this string paste in the following:
   <PaletteRolloutInfo PaletteRolloutDelay="100"/>
   <PaletteRollupInfo  PaletteRollupDelay="800" PaletteHoldopenDelay="4000"/>
   Carriage returns and additional white space in this file is ok.
   

Note: Each of the values is specified in milliseconds. In the sample above the values provided are the same as the defaults (1/10th second rollout delay. So the above string is 8/10th second rollup delay, 4 second holdopen delay). So to change the holdopen delay to 5 seconds use:
<PaletteRollupInfo  PaletteRollupDelay="800" PaletteHoldopenDelay="5000"/>

You will need to restart AutoCAD for these changes to take effect. These changes are global and affect all palettes.

Thanks to Bill for the great question and to Matt for the valuable response!