Adding custom hatches on ARES CE, Bricscad and DraftSight

Adding a custom hatch on ARES CE, Bricscad and DraftSight is quite different than on AutoCAD. You cannot link a folder that contains the custom hatches in program's settings. However adding one or more custom hatches isn't difficult.

All these programs have one .pat file that contains all hatches. So you have to edit this file in order to add any custom hatches.

The path for the file is:

/home/username/Bricsys/Bricscad/V11/en_US/Support/default.pat for Bricscad V11

/home/username/.config/DraftSight/1.2.163/Support/Sample.pat for the current version of DraftSight

/home/username/.config/ARES Commander Edition/1.2.175/Support/Sample.pat for the current version of ARES CE

So you only have to copy the contents of your desired .pat file at the end of the above files to use your custom hatch with these programs.

This might be easy for a few hatches but what happens if you want to add a lot of hatches?
There is an easy way to do that with some bash power.

1. Move your .pat files in one folder
2. Open a terminal in this folder
3. type cat *.pat > allhatches.txt
4. Test the output file allhatches.txt for formatting errors. An easy way is to open this file with your favorite text editor and search for the character *. This character indicates the start of every hatch pattern. Check if there are formatting errors (undefined characters, unnecessary empty lines, bad formatting etc) and correct them. You must have some basic knowledge about how a .pat file must look like. Save the corrected file.
5. Copy the contents of the file allhatches.txt at the end of the above mentioned files in order to use them with your favorite program.

Notice that if you add a lot of hatches, the "select hatch pattern" dialog box of your program may have performance issues. 

 The "select hatch pattern" dialog box in Bricscad after adding a lot of hatches