Selecting viewports

Most of your interactions with the model—such as sketching a part, positioning a load, assembling part instances, generating a mesh, and customizing a plot state—take place in the current viewport. In addition, if you have multiple viewports displayed on the canvas, the current viewport indicates the model you are working on (the current model) and the module you are working in (the current module).

Related Topics
Cascading viewports
Tiling viewports
Managing viewports on the canvas

Context:

There are several ways that you can select a new viewport to be the current viewport:

  • Click on the border or title bar of an existing viewport.

  • Select an existing viewport from the list in the Viewport menu.

  • Use CtrlTab—or select Next or Previous from the Viewport menu—to cycle through all the viewports on the canvas.

    Note:

    On Linux platforms CtrlTab is used to switch applications; CtrlF6 is an alternative keyboard shortcut.

  • Create a new viewport.

The current viewport has a dark gray title bar as shown in the following figure:

  1. Move the cursor onto the border of the viewport.

    If the viewport is hidden, you may need to move other viewports to expose the one you want to select. For more information, see Moving viewports.

  2. Click mouse button 1.

    The viewport becomes the current viewport; the viewport also becomes selected and its title bar changes to blue to indicate that it is the selected viewport. If you click on a tool or menu, the viewport remains current but the title bar reverts to dark gray.

    Note:

    On Windows platforms you can customize the colors used by Abaqus/CAE. For more information, see Common customizations on Windows platforms.