PieMenu v2

Heads up: this rewrite was first and foremost generated with AI, and so is this README. I use it daily and it works for me, but I haven't vetted the code too carefully. Back up your config before trying it.

Pie menus for FreeCAD. Press a key, flick toward a tool, let go. This is a fork of Grubuntu/PieMenu with the internals redone from scratch.

What's different from v1

• Shortcuts are per workbench. The same key can mean different pies in PartDesign and Sketcher, with an "Any workbench" binding as the fallback. Editing a sketch is its own scope (SketchEdit), falling back through Sketcher, so a key can do one thing in the sketcher and another while actually drawing.

• One key — or a spare mouse button (Mouse4/Mouse5) — can carry up to four pies: tap, double-tap, hold, and double-tap-then-hold. Hold gives you the marking-menu flow: the pie follows your aim with an arrow and firing happens on release. A quick tap on a hold binding does nothing instead of leaving a menu behind. A hold always behaves as a marking menu, whatever the pie's click behavior — and once the motion is in your hands, the menu itself is optional: a stroke completed before the pie even renders fires blind (mark-ahead), confirmed by a brief stroke trace, and a stroke that runs on through a door slot continues into that sub-pie as one compound mark. Pause instead, and the pie appears after a fifth of a second, anchored where you pressed — your movement already counts toward the aim. The aim is read as a direction (distance only picks the ring on multi-ring pies), the slot you're aiming at lights up, and the centre names what release will do — "Cancel" in the dead zone. Slots can also carry a one-letter shortcut that fires them while the pie is open.

  

  A gesture can also run a single command instead of a pie — tap for Constrain Radius, hold for the whole constraints pie ("A single command…" in the key's menu).

• Slots can have selection conditions (a face, two objects, an edge...). The same pie under different selections:

  

  When several tools match, a small chooser pops up under the slot, and it remembers which one you picked last.

  

• Slots can open other pies. Hovering one glides straight into it at the cursor, and a back button appears in the middle.

  

• Press P in an open pie to pin it as a floating palette: it stays on top, tools fire without closing it, conditional slots keep following your selection, and you drag it anywhere. Esc or the ✕ unpins. Dropped near a window edge it snaps flush and tucks away to a slim tab when the mouse leaves.

  

• There's a Smart pie that fills itself with your most-used tools for whatever workbench you're in. Counts decay over time so it tracks what you're doing now, not last month — but positions freeze after the first fill, because reshuffling is what kills muscle memory: tools are replaced in place, never moved (Stats… has the reset). Bind it to a key and forget about it. Right-click a tool in it to pin it so it never rotates out, or to ignore it entirely; your top tools land on the cardinal directions first, and what you use with a face selected leads when a face is selected.

• Layouts: circles with multiple rings (uniform, auto-fit by circumference, or custom counts like 8,16), or grids hanging off any side of the cursor with per-block offsets. Here's a two-ring pie and its slot rules in the editor:

  

• Plus: number keys 1-9 fire slots, Shift keeps the pie open so you can chain tools, right-click a slot in a live pie to edit it, macros as slot targets, per-part colors, single-pie export/import as JSON, a whole-setup export/import (every pie plus the keybinds, one file), new pie from any toolbar, a stats panel, the tool you fired last gets a faint accent ring, the shortcuts table warns (⚠) when a key would shadow one of FreeCAD's own, optional auto-open when your selection matches a conditional slot.

Icons come from FreeCAD's own command registry, so a pie full of Sketcher tools looks right even if you've never opened Sketcher this session:

Command names can be shown under the buttons, and the layout spreads so nothing overlaps:

Install

git clone https://github.com/imadnyc/PieMenu ~/PieMenu
ln -s ~/PieMenu ~/.local/share/FreeCAD/v1-1/Mod/PieMenu

Restart FreeCAD. A fresh install starts with the full F3-F9 starter set below, so the first press of F3 already works. An existing v1 PieMenu config gets migrated automatically instead; the v1 data itself is left alone. To merge the starter set into an existing config without touching anything you already have:

freecadcmd ~/PieMenu/dev/install_seed.py

Preferences are under Tools > Accessories > PieMenu preferences.

The starter keys

Key	Anywhere	PartDesign	Sketcher
F3 tap	Main
F3 hold		Modelling	Sketching
F3 double-hold		Patterns
F4 tap / double	Modelling / Patterns
F6	View
F7 tap / hold	Booleans		Constraints
F8	Datums
F9	Smart (your most used)

These sit on F3-F9 because FreeCAD already uses F1 (help), F2 (rename) and F5 (recompute). Bound keys are answered by PieMenu before FreeCAD sees them — never while you're typing in a field — so if you rebind, pick keys FreeCAD doesn't use.

Keys while a pie is open

Key	Does
1-9	fire the numbered slot
Shift + pick	fire without closing, chain several tools
Backspace	back out of a sub-pie
P	pin the pie as a floating palette
Esc / ✕	close a pinned palette
right-click a slot	edit it in the preferences

The same list lives under Keys… in the preferences footer.

Hacking on it

There's a Nix dev environment with FreeCAD 1.1.1 pinned. Everything runs against a throwaway profile in /tmp, so your real config is never touched.

nix run .#launch   # isolated FreeCAD with this repo as the addon
nix run .#watch    # relaunch on save
nix run .#smoke    # headless test suite
nix run .#e2e      # end-to-end in a real offscreen GUI
nix run .#snap     # screenshot the widgets to /tmp/piemenu-snaps

FEATURES.md is the full feature inventory — every feature, where it lives in the code, and how to remove it if it outgrows its welcome. IMPLEMENTATION.md has the schema notes, UI-FEEDBACK.md the design decisions, and mockups/ the HTML mockups the UI was designed in.

Credits and license

Based on PieMenu by microelly (2015), looo, triplus, mdkus, Grubuntu, Pgilfernandez, hasecilu and Ben-PH. LGPL-2.1-or-later, same as the original.