Magpie

Ten daily-use commands that have been sitting in a personal scripts folder for too long. Bundled, named, and shipped as one yak install so they show up properly in the Rhino command line.

Free, MIT, no telemetry, no phone-home. The plugin that registers them is a thin C# wrapper around small Python scripts -- you can read every line of source.

What it does

• _MagpieFindReplaceNames -- find/replace strings across selected object names. The reason this exists: mirroring a port-side assembly to starboard and changing every "port" in the names to "stbd" without clicking through one object at a time.
• _MagpieDim3D -- 3D linear dimension between any two picked points, with dynamic preview as you place the third point.
• _MagpieLayFlat -- pick a face, the object orients so that face sits on the cplane, face up. Useful for fab-orientation views.
• _MagpieSelectByUserText -- SelName-style picker but against user-text key/value pairs, not object names.
• _MagpieMakeFabSublayers -- adds Inside cut (magenta), Mark (dark green), Outside cut (blue) sublayers under a chosen layer. The same sublayer convention Pillbug writes flat patterns into.
• _MagpieExpandLayers / _MagpieCollapseLayers -- expand or collapse every layer in the layers panel in one shot.
• _MagpieLengthAttribute -- compute curve length, write it back as a user-text attribute. Handy for cut-list workflows.
• _MagpieToggleLayoutDarkMode -- toggle layout background between the current color and black. The fastest way to make a layout look right on a projector.
• _MagpieExportToBrfr -- export named views to a .brfr file (a swipeable, mobile-first procedural-knowledge format).

What it isn't

• Not a parametric design plugin. No Grasshopper components, no geometry generators. These are all small, focused commands.
• Not an alternative to Pillbug or Elephant. If you need sheet metal unfolding or durable object identity through destructive operations, those are separate products in this catalog.
• Not a script editor or runner. Magpie commands run their scripts for you; if you want to edit them, the source is in the package's scripts/ directory and on GitHub.

Why it exists

The Rhino plugin ecosystem has a missing middle: lots of small, useful commands that sit in personal c:\scripts\ folders and never get shared, because shipping a single 30-line script as a yak package is overkill, and food4rhino's listing UX punishes anything without a proper plugin chrome.

Magpie is what happens when you batch ten of those scripts into one package, give each a real Rhino command name, and ship it. Roughly the same time investment as one product, ten times the daily-use surface area.

Install

1. In Rhino 8, type _PackageManager.
2. Search magpie and install.
3. Restart Rhino. Run _Magpie to see the command list.

License

MIT. Modify, redistribute, fork. Source on github.com/travw/magpie.

Support

Use the support form for bugs or feature ideas. If a script needs to do one more thing to be useful to you, that's exactly the right kind of feature request.