The user interface

The reference is NX 2212’s ribbon: tabs whose groups collapse into a single group button when the window narrows. Designcenter’s application clusters are not imitated. The order in which groups give up room, the More menu and the sizes are NX-Style’s own and have not yet been compared with NX 2212 itself.

The ribbon fits the window instead of running off its edge. When a tab’s groups do not fit, they give up room in three stages:

The groups holding an application’s main commands give up room last: in Modeling, the groups with Sketch, Extrude, Revolve, Hole, Edge Blend, Chamfer, Pattern Feature, Edit Parameters and the assembly commands. All the other groups are compacted and then collapsed before one of these loses a label. Among groups of equal importance, all of them are compacted before any collapses, starting with the rightmost; the More menu comes last. Every command therefore stays at most two clicks away, at any window size and display scaling.

Right-click a group to choose how it behaves:

These choices are kept for each application, and so is a minimised ribbon (double-click a tab, or the arrow at the right). They are saved straight away in nxstyle.ribbon.json in the profile’s config folder, so they survive a restart.

When the ribbon is minimised, clicking a tab drops its page down over the graphics window. Running a command, or clicking elsewhere, closes it again. A window less than 420 pixels high (at the display’s scaling, for example 1366x768 at 200 %) minimises the ribbon by itself. The ribbon comes back when the window is taller, and this does not change your saved choice.

In a narrow window the Command Finder gets narrower first. If the tabs still do not fit, arrows at the end of the tab row scroll them, and Quick Access buttons that do not fit move into the toolbar’s » menu.

An NX application is a FreeCAD workbench behind the scenes. Applications without a hand-made ribbon get one built from their workbench’s toolbars, so every installed workbench is reachable.

The Pre/Post application (FreeCAD’s FEM workbench) puts an analysis in order on its Home tab. The groups are the steps: 1 Analysis, 2 Material, 3 Loads and Constraints, 4 Mesh, 5 Solve and 6 Results. Each step gets a tick when the active analysis has what it needs, and the next step is underlined in teal:

The ticks show what the analysis contains. They do not check that the setup is complete or correct, for example that the supports remove every rigid-body motion. The Loads, Mesh and Solve and Results tabs hold the full sets: thermal, electromagnetic and fluid boundary conditions, beam and shell sections, Elmer’s solver and equations, and the post-processing filters.