Changing the AutoCAD Text Window Length

I recently received a question from a customer asking how to increase the history length of the AutoCAD text window. As I recall, this used to exposed in the Options dialog but seems to have vanished over time. The default for the text window is 400 lines, meaning that you can press F2 and always see the last 400 lines of whatever has scrolled by at the command line, but sometimes this just isn't long enough and you want to be able to look back further.

You can set the history length of the text window by issuing the following statement at the AutoCAD command line:

Command: (setenv "CmdHistLines" "1000")

In this example, I'm setting the history length to 1000 lines. The allowable range is between 25 lines and 2048 lines. If you try to set a value outside that range, it will default to the last used length. This new value gets saved to the current profile.

If you want to find out the current history length, you can type the following:

Command: (getenv "CmdHistLines")
"1000"

Note that "CmdHistLines" is case-sensitive and must be entered that way. Also, the length value must be included within quotes as shown.

So, while not a new trick by any stretch (it's been around for years), maybe it's new to some of you.

Comments

[Jürgen]

Hi,
very interesting.
Do you have a list of the enviroment variables? I didnt find it in the help.
Thanks for yout help.
regards Jürgen (from Germany)

[Tom Stoeckel]

I don't know if we have an official list but here is a link to a document that has many (if not most) of the environment variables:

http://www.hyperpics.com/downloads/resources/customization/autolisp/AutoCAD%20Environment%20Variable%20Quick%20Guide.pdf

It hasn't been updated in quite a while but I expect this is the majority of them.

[Jürgen]

Thanks for your help.
Regard Jürgen