Customize and Share Your Rhino UI

In this tutorial, learn about the logic behind the new icon redesign, learn how to create hotkeys in Rhino, customize your toolbars and other UI elements. Then save your Window Layout and share with your colleagues, in a lab or to your other computers.

• Understand the New Icons
• Create Instant Aliases
• Choose Your Command Line Style
• Customize Your Toolbars
• Create A Custom Toolbar Icon
• Panels
• Transfer Your Settings
• Save and Share Window Layouts

Understand the New Icons

Rhino has an enormous number of tools, which makes it extremely powerful but hard to learn. Up to Rhino 8, every icon shared the same base color, used a different logic to show input versus output geometry, and packed in a lot of visual detail. That made it difficult to tell one tool from another at a glance. In Rhino 9, icons have been redesigned around a consistent color and clarity system, and we’ll walk through the logic so it clicks the first time you see it.

1. Open Rhino 9 and switch to any toolbar tab, for example the Solid Tools or Surface Tools tab.

2. Notice the color families used across the icons:

   • Grape | Mesh
   • Blue | NURBS
   • Cyan | SubD
   • Lime | Transform, Edit
   • Orange | Rendering
   • Yellow | Selection, File

   These colors come from the Open Color palette, optimized for UI design.

3. Look closely at a few multi-part icons: only the piece of the icon affected by the tool is colored, while the rest stays gray. This makes the icon’s specific function easier to read at a glance.

4. Compare an icon that takes geometry as input against one that outputs new geometry. Notice how input and output are now visually distinguished rather than looking identical.

5. Find the simplified icons for Print, Options, the Sun, and Set View. These were redrawn for better legibility.

6. If you also use Grasshopper 2, compare its icon set side-by-side with Rhino’s. You’ll notice the two are now much closer in style, making it easier to move between the two applications.

Create Instant Aliases (Hot Keys)

Give your spacebar a break! An Alias is a keyboard shortcut configured to run a Rhino command or macro. Up through Rhino 8, running an alias meant typing it and then pressing Enter, an extra step that adds up over a long modeling session. Rhino 9 introduces Instant Aliases, which run the moment you finish typing the letters, no Enter required.

1. Open Options and go to the Aliases page.

2. Find the new Instant checkbox column next to each alias.

   

3. Turn on Instant for an alias you use constantly, for example, set ZE to run Zoom Extents.

4. Close Options, click in the viewport, and type ze. Notice the command runs immediately, without pressing Enter.

5. Try typing a longer alias that starts with the same letters, such as zea for Zebra. Since ze is instant, it will fire before you can finish typing. Hold Shift while typing to bypass instant aliases when you need the longer one.

Choose Your Command Line Style

The command line has always been central to how Rhino works, but Windows and Mac have historically offered very different experiences: Windows leaned on a persistent, text-heavy history, while Mac favored a graphical sidebar with popups for options. Rhino 9 unifies this and every command line style is now available on both platforms.

1. Run the CommandMode command.

2. Choose between the three available modes:

   • Search Mode: a popup search-and-options interface (previously Mac-only, via “Use command options dialog”).
   • SideBar Mode: the graphical command sidebar (previously the Mac default).
   • History Mode: the classic text-heavy command line with scrollback (previously the Windows default).

3. And three available styles:

   • Buttons: a new style which is a mixture of the Graphical style on the Mac and the Links on Windows.
   • Graphical: the graphical selection (previously the Mac default).
   • Links: the classic text-heavy option (previously the Windows default).

4. Type a command in each mode to compare the experience, and confirm that command history is available no matter which mode you’re in.

5. If you’re using SideBar mode, try docking the Rhinoceros Sidebar wherever suits your layout.

Customize Your Toolbars

Toolbars are the clickable icon groups that surround the Rhino interface. They’re the primary way most people interact with commands beyond typing. In Rhino 9, the toolbar system has been substantially reworked: the old “diff” file mechanism is gone, a proper default.rui is back, and nearly all toolbar editing now lives in a single dialog.

1. Run the Toolbar command to open the consolidated Toolbar dialog.

2. Create a new custom toolbar by going to File → New RUI file, or open an existing one by choosing Open RUI file. When creating a new RUI file, you start by giving the file a name and selecting which folder you want to save it in.

3. To edit a toolbar, select the toolbar and press Edit → Edit Toolbar, right-click the toolbar and choose Edit Toolbar, or press the Toolbars button on the .rui file.

   

4. Right-click the new toolbar and choose Edit Selected to make changes to it.

   

5. Edit the toolbar to your liking. You can search for specific buttons in the search bar in the upper right corner, and when you find the one you’re looking for, press the + sign under Add to add it to your toolbar.

   

6. Use the language dropdown in the upper right corner to preview how your toolbar text reads in another language.

7. From the Edit menu, you can undo/redo and copy/cut/paste on toolbar items to rearrange things without starting over. You can also choose Insert New Button if you need to add a customized button. For more on how to customize a new button, see the next section.

   

8. When you’re done editing your toolbar. Press OK to save your changes. Remember - In order for the new Toolbar to show up as floating in Rhino, you have to click the lightbulb icon in front of the Toolbar name in the list of toolbars.

Create a Toolbar Icon

1. To add a new toolbar button:

   • In the Toolbar Editor, you can press the Edit menu and choose Insert New Button. Once the new button is added, you can select it and choose Edit → Edit Button.
   • In Rhino, you can right-click in the toolbar that you want to add a button to and choose New Button….
   

2. Add a name to the button. It will automatically fill in the Name in all places.

   

3. Write the command you want the button to execute into the Command section. In the example we use ! _SelNone _SelLight _Invert _Zoom _Selected _SelNone. The Tooltip will automatically fill in with the command name. If you want to change it, in this case, change it to Zoom Extents Except Lights.

   

4. Add a custom icon to the button by pressing the + sign under Appearance. Choose the + sign under Light as a start.

5. In the SVG Editor, you can draw your own icon by using the drawing tools in the SVG Editor itself, or you can import an SVG file to be used in the button. You can also import an image and then draw on top of it. Once you’re satisfied with your icon, press OK to save your changes.

   

Panels

Panels give you quick access to controls like Layers, Properties, and Materials without leaving your modeling view. Rhino groups them into tabbed containers, the same idea as the toolbars and sidebar you’ve already customized, so you can combine, split, or rearrange them however you work best.

1. Open any panel from the Panels menu, click on the + tab or right-click a tab (or click the panel menu button) to choose one from the list, including panels added by plug-ins.

   

2. Drag a tab to a new position to reorder the tabs within a container.

3. Drag a tab out of its container to pop it into its own floating panel window, or drag it into a different panel window to move it there.

4. Dock a second panel container above, below, or beside your first one if you’d rather keep two groups of tabs visible side by side instead of combining everything into one container.

5. Right-click an empty part of the tab row (or use the panel menu button) to switch tabs between Horizontal and Vertical, change the Tab size, or toggle Show panel text.

   

Transfer Your Settings

Whether you’re backing up your setup, moving to a new computer, or handing a ready-to-go configuration to a colleague, a student, or an entire lab, Rhino 9 bundles everything into one file type: .rhs.

1. Run OptionsExport. This creates a .rhs file containing your Window Layouts, Keyboard Shortcuts, Aliases, Plug-ins, Schemes, Default and Custom RUIs, Advanced Settings, Window Positions, and Rhino Options.
2. To bring settings into another installation on the same operating system, use OptionsImport: this merges the incoming settings with what’s already there.
3. To move your entire setup from an older Rhino version, a different machine’s .rhs export, or a backup, use OptionsMigrate. It’s the modern replacement for the old OptionsImporter / PreviousOptionsImporter commands.
4. As a shortcut, drag and drop a .rhs file directly onto the Rhino window instead of running a command.

Save and Share Window Layouts

Window Layouts let you capture an entire arrangement of toolbars and panels (everything you set up in the sections above) and switch between presets instantly. Since Rhino 8, the interface is substantially similar between Windows and Mac, so a layout you build on one platform will feel familiar on the other.

1. Arrange your toolbars, panels, and viewport layout for a specific task (a clean Rendering setup with just the panels you need visible, for example).
2. Go to the Window menu → Window Layouts → Save Window Layout… and give it a name.
3. Go to Window → Window Layouts → Manage Window Layouts… to see your saved layouts, restore one, or import a layout someone else made.
4. Share the resulting .rhw file with a colleague, copy it to a lab machine, or move it to your other computer. Rhino’s proportional window positioning keeps everything where you put it, even across screens of different sizes.

Rhino Commands

• CommandMode
• Toolbar
• OptionsExport
• OptionsImport
• OptionsMigrate
• WindowLayout
• SaveWindowLayout
• Reset

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