Toolbars

There are multiple toolbars to explore; let's take a look at some of the main ones. Toolbars are fully adjustable and dockable. The faint upright dots (in Windows) indicate the start of a toolbar and a faint vertical line indicates the end of a toolbar.

• Project: This toolbar contains the tools needed to create, open, save, and access the print layout (two buttons) and the style manger:

• Map Navigation: This toolbar contains the pan and zoom tools, as well as bookmarks (customized zoom) and map refresh:

• Attributes: These tools are used to identify, select, open attribute tables, and measure:

• Label: These tools are used to add, configure, and modify labels
• Plugins: This currently only contains the Python Console tool, but will be filled in by additional Python plugins
• Database: Currently, this toolbar only contains DB Manager
• Raster: This toolbar includes histogram stretch, and brightness and contrast control
• Vector: This currently only contains the Coordinate Capture tool, but it will be filled in by additional Python plugins
• Web: This is currently empty, but it will also be filled in by additional Python plugins
• Help: This toolbar points to the option for downloading the user manual

All these toolbars are shown in the following screenshot:

On the left screen border, we place the Manage Layers toolbar. This toolbar contains the tools for adding layers from the vector or raster files, databases, web services, and text files. It also contains the tools for creating new layers:

• Digitizing: The tools in this toolbar enable basic feature-creation and editing.
• Shape Digitizing: Useful for quickly building different shapes when editing.
• Advanced Digitizing: This toolbar contains the Undo/Redo option, advanced editing tools, the geometry-simplification tool, and so on. When activated, the right part of the screenshot is accessible:

•  The data source manager toolbar contains buttons to quickly create new geopackage files and shapefiles, as well as calling the data source manager and creating temporary scratch layers:

Toolbars can be accessed by right-clicking on a menu or toolbar, which will open a context menu with all the available toolbars and panels. All the tools on the toolbars can also be accessed via the menu. If you deactivate the Manage Layers Toolbar, for example, you will still be able to add layers using the Layer menu.

As you might have guessed by now, QGIS is highly customizable. You can increase your productivity by assigning shortcuts to the tools you use regularly. You can do this by going to Settings | Configure Shortcuts. Similarly, if you realize that you never use a certain toolbar button or menu entry, you can hide it by going to Settings | Interface Customization: