Settings
Everything CADshift lets you change lives in one window. Open it from the Tools tab → CadShift panel → CadShift, or press F1 on that button to land back here.
Settings are per Windows user and take effect as soon as you press Save — except the hotkeys, which rebind immediately, and the DXF export defaults, which the export window reads when it opens.
Hotkeys
Click a box, then press the combination you want. CADshift accepts three shapes:
| Shape | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A modifier plus a key | Ctrl+Tab | The default for the Document Switcher |
| A single key | S | The default for the Command Palette |
| A two-key sequence | Z A | Press them in order, quickly |
Reset puts a box back to its shipped default.
A bare letter is safe
The Command Palette opens on S with no modifier, which sounds alarming until you try to type. CADshift’s keyboard hook checks whether a text field has focus first and passes the key straight through when one does, so renaming a feature, filling a dimension box or typing in a parameter table is unaffected.
It also only listens while Inventor is the foreground window. Keys you press in other applications never reach CADshift.
If an upgrade finds you still on the old Ctrl+Space default, CADshift rewrites it to S once and leaves any key you chose yourself alone.
Document switcher
Sort order decides how the switcher lists your open documents:
- Most recently used — the one you were in before this one is always second, which is what makes Ctrl+Tab-and-release a toggle between two files
- Alphabetical — steady positions, better if you navigate by muscle memory
- Open order — the order Inventor opened them
Insert behaviour
Show Insert / Advanced zones on thumbnails controls the two click zones that appear when you hover a part in the switcher while a drawing or assembly is active. The left zone inserts at the default position; the right zone hands the component to your cursor to place.
Turn it off and the thumbnails go back to plain switching. Keyboard switching is unaffected either way.
Insert is a Professional feature; the zones are hidden on other tiers rather than shown and refused.
Appearance
Window opacity applies to the overlay windows — the palette and the switcher — between 70% and 100%. It does not affect the DXF export window or the profile editor, which are ordinary dialogs.
Pinned commands
Commands you pin appear at the top of the Command Palette, above the search results, whatever you have typed. Pin from the palette itself: highlight a command and press the pin.
Licence
Manage License… at the bottom of the window opens the licence dialog: which products this computer is registered for, how long each has left, and the Register box for a product key.
- Register activates this computer against a key
- Unregister releases the seat so another computer can use it
- Refresh re-checks with the server — useful after a renewal
A seat is one computer at a time. Unregistering here is how you move your licence to a new machine.
See Installation & Licence for what the tiers include and how the 14-day trial works.
Where settings live
%AppData%\CadShiftForInventor\settings.json.
It is plain JSON and CADshift rewrites it on Save. If it is ever corrupted — a half-written file after a power cut, say — CADshift renames it aside and starts from defaults rather than refusing to load.
Saved document groups sit beside it in document-groups.json. DXF Output Profiles are
somewhere else on purpose: %AppData%\CadShift\DxfProfiles, shared with CADshift for
SOLIDWORKS.