Sanity Savers - Selection Tip for AutoCAD Architecture 2008

I'd spoken with a few people in the past couple of months about a problem we'd all been experiencing with making selections in ACA08.

Whenever I would select my objects then choose a command (either from a button or from the right-click menu), my selection set would be cleared.

But, when I typed the command or chose it from the 'recent commands' flyout in the right-click menu, it would act as expected.

So, in those cases, I would either try to remember to choose my command first, or input 'P' (for previous) if the selection set had been cleared.

Now, all of us had already tried the PICKFIRST, PICKADD and DBLCLKEDIT system variables, but, we had no joy.

I was cruising around the Autocad discussion groups last week when I came across another user who had someone experiencing the same thing.

And a forum user, Joe Burke posted the solution!

Reply From: Joe Burke

Date: Dec/22/07

Re: problem with selecting objects

At the command line check the value of the undocumented system variable QAFLAGS.

That's the problem, if it set to anything other than zero.

Joe Burke

Sure enough, when we all checked, we discovered that this variable had been set at '1'.

Well, since QAFLAGS is an undocumented SysVar, I did a bit of googling to see which nerds have revealed the finer details!

In this case, the ones who came through were Jimmy Bergmark, Owen Wengerd and Lee Ambrosius:

http://www.jtbworld.com/autocadtips.htm

Jimmy - heading: Undocumented

QAFLAGS acceps a value between 0 and 32767
bit 0 (1) : ^C in menu macro cancels grips (acts like keyboard ).
bit 1 (2) : no pause during text screen listings.
bit 2 (4) : no "alert" dialogs (text display instead).
bit 7 (128) : accepts "screen picks" (point lists) via (command) function.

Normally QAFLAGS should be set to 0. Because it might be set to other values it is a good idea to put (setvar "QAFLAGS" 0) in acaddoc.lsp or any other of your lisp files that you use for startup.

Also Owen:

http://www.manusoft.com/Resources/AcadExposed/Main.stm

and Lee:

http://www.hyperpics.com/system_variables/

For the customization guys, here was a tip posted in the AUGI AutoCAD Tips and Tricks forum:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=24081

pemin (patrick emin)

2005-08-12

Set the QAFLAGS variable to 2 to prevent the pauses in the text window. This can be used to list all layers or blocks in order to copy paste the text in a text editor without generating pages breaks.

So, a big 'THANKS!' to Joe Burke for posting the answer in the AutoCAD discussion forum and to the other guys for documenting it, I hope that more people will benefit from hearing about this little-known variable.