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Toolbar plist for MacOS

Mac version of Rhino uses .plist files instead of .rui for toolbars; however, there's no practicaly way of converting your pre-existing toolbar macros from rui to plist. The only way seems to recreate the toolbar in mac and then export that toolbar as a plist.

Official documentation reference

Official documentation from McNeel can be found here: https://developer.rhino3d.com/guides/rhinocommon/loading-tool-palettes-mac/

Note that it is focused on creating plists for plugins, plists created by TestEditToolPaletteCollection cannot be imported by Rhino manually.

Creating toolbar in Rhino (Mac)

Toolbars in the Mac version of Rhino is divided by Command sets (like different workspaces in Adobe). We have to first create a new command set to create new macros toolbar. If you already have custom sets, it's best to duplicate the Default instead of your current set (more on this later).

  • Toolbars are created by creating a palette (left top)
  • Macros are created and modified at the bottom
  • Macros can be added to the toolbar by drap and drop to the top center section
  • Seperate function can be assigned to the right click by dropping to the right of a selected macro

An icon can be set by drag and dropping a png file to the icon window in the bottom right

Creating plist

Once all the macros and toolbars required are created, it can be exported to create a plist file by using the commnad ExportPreferences. Do note that you get no options to configure what you export, it basically exports everything (you can see what items it exports in the next section), this is why in the previous section I recommended duplicating the Default command set.

Importing plist

Once you have the plist, it can be imported on another machine. Note that if you are calling external files, they have to be in the same location on the other machine.

To import the plist, use the command ImportPreferences

Here you can choose what to import, you're free to check all the options, but practically speaking, if you only want to import toolbars, only checking Tool palettes is enough.

Once imported, each toolbar has to be activated individually

Modiying plist

It's not practical to modify the plist directly, to modify the commands or toolabrs in the plist, simply import, modifythe set directly, then save it as a new plist (or overwrite pre-existing)