Introducing the Status Bar
The Status bar appears in the lower-right corner of the program window and contains an assortment of tools for controlling various drawing aids, such as grid display, snap mode, and polar tracking, as well as tools for toggling between model space and paper space, choosing the desired annotation scale, switching workspaces, and so on. You can customize the Status bar to control which tools are visible. Note that the available tools may change, depending on whether you are working in model space or paper space. If there are more tools than can fit onto a single row, the Status bar may wrap onto two rows.
When you first start AutoCAD, you are working in model space, and the tools displayed on the Status bar include drawing aid tools such as grid display, Snap mode, Infer Constraints, Ortho mode, Polar Tracking, Isometric Drafting, Object Snap Tracking, and Object Snap. You can control each of these by clicking the button to toggle the particular drawing aid on and off. For example, to toggle the display of the drawing grid, click the Display drawing grid button.
Note that the Status bar also includes tools for controlling the creation and display of annotation objects and for setting the annotation scale of the current view, as well as controls for workspace switching, annotation monitoring, hardware acceleration, and isolating objects, among others.
Some tools are not initially visible on the Status bar. When you click the Customization button, you see a menu listing all of the Status bar tools. Only those with an adjacent checkmark are currently visible on the Status bar. Typically, only the most frequently used tools are visible. To add a tool to the Status bar, select it in this list. For example, if you find that you often toggle the display of line weight on and off, select LineWeight to immediately make this tool visible on the Status bar. Similarly, if the Status bar includes tools that you do not use very often, you can remove them. For example, if you do not use the isometric drafting tools, click Isometric Drafting to clear its checkmark and immediately remove that tool from the Status bar. When you are finished making changes, simply click anywhere away from the menu to close it.
Some of the Status bar tools have an adjacent arrow. You can click this arrow to see a shortcut menu containing options for that particular tool. For example, when you click the arrow adjacent to Snap mode, you see a shortcut menu that lets you toggle between Polar Snap or Grid Snap, or you can click Snap Settings… to display the Snap and Grid tab of the Drafting Settings dialog box. This dialog box lets you change the settings for Grid and Snap, Polar Tracking, Object Snap, 3D Object Snap, Dynamic Input, Quick Properties, and Selection Cycling. Click Cancel to close this dialog.
Similarly, when you click the arrow adjacent to Object Snap, you see a shortcut menu that shows the current running object snap modes that would be active when Object Snap is toggled on. You can easily turn any of these object snaps on and off or click Object Snap Settings… to display the Object Snap tab of the Drafting Settings dialog box. This is the same dialog box that opened when you clicked Snap Settings…, but now it has automatically opened to a different tab. Again, click Cancel to close this dialog.
Typically, any tool on the Status bar that has additional options or a shortcut menu will have an adjacent arrow. But there are a few exceptions. For example, if you right-click Infer Constraints, you can choose Infer Constraints Settings… to open the Constraint Settings dialog box. Click Cancel to close this dialog.
Similarly, when you right-click Grid Display, you can choose Grid Settings….However, when you right-click any tool that also has an adjacent arrow, you see the same shortcut menu that displays when you simply click that adjacent arrow. For example, when you right-click Snap mode, you see the same shortcut menu. So you can choose whether you prefer to click the arrow or right-click the button.
Lastly, note that some of the drawing aid tools also have keyboard shortcuts that can be used to toggle them on and off. When you move the cursor over a tool, the tooltip shows its keyboard shortcut. For example, you can toggle the grid display by pressing the F7 key, toggle snap mode by pressing F9, toggle polar tracking by pressing F10, and so on.
Source: Autodesk
