Customizable tool panel

Currently Illustrator holds about 48 tools in its tool panel. Some of them are rarely used in my workflow (say Scallop or Flares...) At the same time other tools, more useful for my purposes, are not so easily accessible.
I'd like to be able to customize a panel with my frequently used tools and save it in my workspace
-i use a laptop so screen real state is precious-
Maybe there's a way to do it, but I'm unaware of it.
(note for an hypothetical Adobe developer reader of this forums: the pen tool not joining unselected paths or the ability to join multiple paths without selecting endpoints requests have a much higher priority in my personal wishlist)
thanks!

On Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:09:05 +0000, [email protected] wrote:
> Currently Illustrator holds about 48 tools in its tool panel. Some of them
> are rarely used in my workflow (say Scallop or Flares...) At the same time
> other tools, more useful for my purposes, are not so easily accessible.
>
> I'd like to be able to customize a panel with my frequently used tools and
> save it in my workspace
I couldn't agree more.
If I remember correctly, there used to be a plug-in for older versions of
Illustrator that allowed the building of custom toolbars. I think it was by
Extensis and I think it was called Vector Tools. And if I may point out,
without wishing to rile the Luddites here, Freehand has this capability
in-built.
A small amount of customisation is possible by removing items from the Tools
folder. I have no use for the Eraser tool and Adobe chose to hide the
Scissors tool, which I do use frequently, behind it in the Toolbar. By
removing EraserTool.aip from Plug-ins>Tools, the Scissors tool is once again
foremost.
I'm hoping that Configurator for Photoshop will eventually be available for
Illustrator so that I can construct a new Toolbar, fashioned exactly as I
want it. For example, I would prefer the Rectangle, Ellipse and Polygon tools
to be always visible rather than nested. I would like to have my most-used
Pathfinder and Action buttons on the main Toolbar. And so on.
Michael
mhphillips at gmail dot com

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