New AUTO-APPEND in 2012

Here is something that I found cool but annoying with AutoCAD 2012. Here’s the situation, if you forgot the name of a command, the old way (which still works) of finding this command is to enter the first letter or first couple of letters. Then hit the tab button and all the commands (and even system variables) show up in the command line. Try it, it’s cool. Now in AutoCAD 2012, as you type the first couple of letters of a command, it will automatically generate a list of  what you used to have to hit tab to see. This is pretty cool because you can see all these commands that maybe you forgot that even existed. Or even better, it shows you the aliases to these command. I found a couple aliases that I forgot existed.

The annoying thing is that they also enabled the “Auto-Append” function which means that after you enter your third character, it tries to guess what command you are trying to use. I tried to do a command yesterday at least three times and it wouldn’t work. This is partly because I have to look at the keyboard when I type. So before you get frustrated like I did, here’s how to disable the “Auto-Append” function:

• Start typing any command.
• As the list of command populates, right-click on any command within the list.
• Uncheck the “Auto-Append” function from the list.

In the picture below, you can see how the “Auto-Append” function works both turned ON & OFF.