Every team that migrates off AutoCAD budgets for new licenses, file migration, and retraining. Almost nobody budgets for the real cost: six weeks of drafters fumbling for commands they've typed ten thousand times.
So we ran a comparison worth reading before your next migration: 31 common commands aliased across AutoCAD, GstarCAD, ZWCAD, and Autodesk's free DWG FastView viewer. The result is reassuring.
The short version: aliases are portable
Because GstarCAD and ZWCAD both target AutoCAD compatibility (and both honor the same LISP/PGP alias conventions), the single-letter and two-letter aliases your team types without thinking are identical on all three platforms.
| Command | Alias | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| LINE | L | Straight line segments |
| CIRCLE | C | Center/radius or diameter circle |
| ARC | A | Three-point arc |
| RECTANGLE | REC | Closed rectangular polyline |
| POLYLINE | PL | The 2D polyline (learn this one deeply) |
| POLYGON | POL | Equilateral closed polyline |
| HATCH | H | Fill enclosed areas |
| ERASE | E | Delete objects |
| OFFSET | O | Parallel lines and concentric circles |
| TRIM | TR | Trim to cutting edges |
| EXTEND | EX | Extend to boundary edges |
| FILLET | F | Rounds and fillets |
| EXPLODE | X | Break blocks into primitives |
| MOVE / COPY | M / CO | The daily drivers |
| MIRROR | MI | Mirrored copies |
| ROTATE | RO | Rotation around a base point |
| SCALE | SC | Proportional scaling |
| STRETCH | S | Stretch with crossing window |
The full 31-command matrix, including DWG FastView's mobile variants, is free and searchable at CADGuide's shortcut tool.
The one exception: LEADER
AutoCAD's default for the LE alias now resolves to MLEADER (multileader), while GstarCAD and ZWCAD keep LE bound to the classic LEADER/QLEADER behavior. Your old annotation routine won't break — but the arrowhead and text behavior differ slightly, so check your dimension styles during migration. If you live in the PGP file anyway, this is a one-line fix to make behavior identical.
Three migration tips from the data
- Your PGP file is portable. Both GstarCAD and ZWCAD read the same alias convention, so exporting your customized acad.pgp and remapping is minutes of work, not days of retraining.
- Audit before you retrain. Pull your team's actual usage: most shops use 15–20 commands daily out of the hundreds available. Compare only those 20, not the whole command set.
- The mobile viewer is the odd one out. DWG FastView on phones replaces many typed aliases with tool gestures. If your field crews annotate on tablets, budget a little extra familiarization time there.
Try it yourself
The interactive version of this comparison — searchable, with all 31 commands across the four platforms — lives at CADGuide.tools. It's free, runs entirely in your browser, and pairs well with a coffee on migration-planning day.
If you've migrated teams between CAD platforms recently, I'd genuinely like to hear what broke that these command comparisons don't cover — comments are open.
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