In honor of the record-setting blizzard that dropped 2+ feet of snow on us this weekend, I thought I'd post today about a way for you to dig through the layer information in your drawing. (Get it? Dig, snow...okay, it's a stretch.)Layer Walk (on the expanded portion of the Layers panel, or at the command line as LAYWALK) is a former Express Tool that made its way into the core program back in AutoCAD LT 2007. It's basically a quick and easy way to check the content of one or more layers at a time. Here's a look at the dialog (click on the image for a larger view): By default, all layers that are currently on are selected in the dialog -- in the image above, that's everything except Lighting.You can select one or more layers by clicking and dragging or with CTRL and SHIFT to display only the contents of those layers. You can also use the "select objects" button to select an area of the drawing and highlight the layers those objects are on, as seen in the image below. The Purge button is only active if there are eligible empty layers selected. The filter box lets you type in a search string (with or without wildcards), and displays the layers that meet those criteria. There's also an extensive right-click menu: "Holding" selected layer(s) means they will always be displayed, even if not selected. Other actions for the selection set include Select All, Clear All, and Invert Selection. Select Unreferenced highlights all layers that can be purged. Inspect displays the number of layers in the drawing, the number of layers selected, and the number of objects on the selected layers.The last 3 options help you manage your filters like the one seen above.Last but not least, the "Restore on Exit" checkbox determines whether the visibility changes you made will be discarded (if the box is checked) or retained (if it is not checked) when you exit the command. For a full list of no-longer-Express layer tools, check out this post from the archives.And to give you an idea of what we're digging out from, here are a couple pictures I took this weekend. I don't know how it is where you live, but in DC, cars actually disappearing under the snow is a pretty rare occurrence.After the snow stopped, though, it did look very beautiful: Now it won't be long before all the pretty fresh snow turns brown and ugly from dirt and plowing...is it spring yet??

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