Ever since the Dimension Palette was introduced it has constantly annoyed me. I never use it and sometimes inadvertently activate it and then often end up applying parentheses to a dimension just as as result of muscle memory. Today I discovered another annoyance about it. It’s appearance blocks all hot keys. I hadn’t noticed this before, but today I was trying to assign a hotkey to a macro that switches selected dimensions from decimal to fraction and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working when assigned to a hot key. The macro worked fine when run directly, but nothing when using the hotkey. Then I noticed the Dimension Palette and sure enough with a one inch or so mouse move to make it disappear, the hot key worked. Just one more reason to hate the thing. I had a look in the SW Knowledge Base and found this gem:
So, feel free to disable the Dimension Palette, as long as you don’t need any of the actual useful popup menus.