Tuesday, July 05, 2022

a new trick in Stellarium!

This old dog learned a new trick.

During the Monday night Stellarium level 2 training course, one of my students (Larry?) pointed out that right-clicking the Move a Telescope to... button would bring up the Telescope Configure box.

How about that...

A super-fast way to access the configuration controls!

I had never right-clicked a button in Stellarium... In general, it's not a "normal" thing. You don't do that. Larry intimdated he discovered it just by clicking around with his mouse until something happened! Ha! So, this was rather intriguing.

Today, I took it one step further. 

I had a hunch...

It seems that for any button in the horizontal toolbar—which is for a plug-in—will act the same way.

I had the Angle measure, Show exoplanets, Toggle meteor showers, Show meteor showers search dialog, Artificial satellites, and the Move a Telescope to buttons in the toolbar.

Right-clicking worked for all (except the meteor search button).

This is a neat little shortcut that saves a bunch of clicks!

Take the angular measurement tool for an example. To get to the configure window by "normal" means:

  1. click the Configuration window button or press F2
  2. click the Plugins tab
  3. if necessary, scroll plug-ins list
  4. click the Angle measure item
  5. click the configure button

Four or five steps vs one!

Thank you, Larry.

Shared with the Stellarium trainers! Hopefully they can put it to use. I know I sure will. An awesome power-user tip. 

Needs to go into my Stellarium companion materials and shortcut guide too!

Asked Ian if he can check for a quick equivalent for the Mac OS...

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Chris V texted me. Said this did not work on his computer. He's hanging back on version 0.21.1 as he depends heavily on the Bookmarks feature.

I dove into the release notes...

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Found it!

Stellarium v 0.21.2 released, circa Sep 2021. Spotted in the "major changes" section of this version:

Right-click opens plugin configuration.

So, there you have it. A relatively new feature.

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