The variety of tools available is the source of Alias’s power, but finding tools in the palette can become potentially time consuming. You can make commonly used tools available more quickly, and hide rarely used tools until you need them.

Alias provides three solutions: shelves, marking menus, and hotkeys.

Shelves are like the palettes, except you control the tools’ options and their position on the shelves. You use shelves to organize all your commonly used tools.

Marking menus appear at the current mouse location. They provide a very fast method to choose the tools you use most often (such as Pick > Object ).

Hotkeys are special key combinations that perform common menu or tool commands.