Are you a visual or semantic person, pictures or text? You do have the choice to select your preference.
Back a few AutoCAD releases ago, we made the default for the Drawing Tools buttons in the status bar display as graphical icons instead of the text. I am going to show you how to change these to what you prefer.
There were several reasons for this change as graphical icons are not language specific, so they do not need to be localized for every AutoCAD supported language. Icons also provided a more modern look in a User Interface, saved space, and a few other reasons the design team considered. The decision was not made until speaking with customers and some usability research to better understand what users thought of the change and how they would use them and discover any areas of concern especially when you take the default text away and have to find a graphic that conveys the option.
You have the choice of the default graphical icons.
Or use the text version. 
All you need to do is simply right-click the Drawing Tools buttons in the status bar, and then select right-click context menu option to use icons or text.
That’s it!
AutoCAD features have so many ways to customize things. You can easily change most everything even if you wanted your AutoCAD 2013 to look like AutoCAD 2000 or even R12, you could do it.
While I am on the Status Bar topic, here is another tip. You can right-click on the blank space on the status bar and get more AutoCAD options set to your preferences.
Cheers,
Shaan
There are so many icons in AutoCAD that I prefer to have the text buttons.
60/40 in favor of TEXT on my informal poll a few months ago. http://cadpanacea.com/node/363
I am 100% in favor of TEXT buttons. I don’t care if the icons exist, as long as I can go TEXT. Please don’t take this away.
Thanks for the survey results from you blog. It sounds about right.
Just imagine however from a software development perspective, some German abbreciations or commands are almost double length of English and all the localization required of anything text into multiple languages.
Seeing that the ribbon has incorporated text next to so many buttons. I prefer text instead of buttons. When people have the icons displayed they tend to hover over the icons until the text appears anyway, so why not eliminate that guessing game and switch over to text?
One thing that I wish were improved with this feature is where the setting is saved. It’s not a system variable or in the options dialog box. We found a setting for it in the .arg but switching this out when creating a new profile tends to get forgotten…
Text for me! Some of the icons clearly convey their function, others do not. Text is unambiguous.
I’ve been using Acad since v9 back in 1988, and saw buttons for several functions change icon, color, place… All these changes are very confusing and actually decrease the level of efficiency. Heck, the only thing that hasn’t changed yet is their shape! Not that I want hexagonal buttons in v2014 🙂
Case in point: the Explode button. First it was a stick of dynamite, full color. I couldn’t think of a better icon to go with the Explode command.
Then the colors gave way to greys. Less clear, but OK, I can live with that. And now (for political correctness’ sake?) the dynamite was replaced by a cube with detached surfaces. How clear is that?
Back on topic: is there a way to turn of the statusbar icons by means of a script? I can’t seem to find a variable connected to this…
Steve and Greg, the setting is stored in the registry. But setting in via lisp [using (setenv)], does not do anything.
If you set it using a reg file while AutoCAD is not running, then when you launch AutoCAD, it will read this setting.
The path is:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\Rxx.x\ACAD-Bxxx:xxx\Profiles\\General
and the entry is a DWORD named “AppStatusBarUseIcons”, with a value of 0 to use TEXT.
Well, just don’t take the English text buttons away 🙂
Thank you R.K. for jumping in on this question.
Thanks for hunting down that registry key Rick
Rick, thanks for your reply.
I’ve found that typing APPSTATUSBARUSEICONS on the commandline and setting it to 0 does change the registry, yet it only shows the next time you open acad.
But that’s good enough for me: I’ve put it in a script that sets a few dozen other variables to the desired value. I only have to run the script once after installating acad.
As I support several hundred users, that script is a real timesaver…
The issue of extra work to translate text on buttons is half true… because the tooltip text has to be translated anyway, and let’s face it, this is not a considerable amount of work considering these translations are unlikely to change very often…