The toolbar is the row of buttons under the pull-down menus. This section explains what the various buttons do. Holding the pointer over a button for a couple of seconds will show the name and hotkey for that button.

Selection controls
These buttons, only one of which is down at a time, control what happens when you click or drag with the mouse. If the first one (Select) is chosen, dragging will do nothing. This is useful if you've got your objects right where you want them, and don't want to accidentally move one when selecting it. The second one, Select and Move, lets you drag ships around with the mouse. The third one, Select and Rotate, lets you rotate ships.

The astute reader will wonder how two-dimensional mousing can affect three-dimensional position and orientation. That's what the Constraint controls are for.

Rotate locally
This lets you rotate a ship around its own axes, rather than the global axes. X is pitch, Y is yaw, and X is roll.

Constraint controls
One of these buttons is down at any given time, and controls which directions things are free to move or rotate in. If the X button is down, dragging an object will move it along or rotate it around the X axis. (From the initial camera viewpoint, X is left-right, Y is up-down, and Z is front-back.) The buttons which allow movement in two dimensions, such as XZ, give you more power at the price of precision; you might want to use one of these when first placing things, and then use one-dimensional movement (or the Objects editor) for precise positioning.

Select list
This opens up a window, which lets you select objects by name, rather than by finding and pointing at them. The checkboxes on the right control which things are available for selecting, which could be useful if you have a lot of objects.

You can select objects just as you would select files in a Win95 file box: click on one to select it, shift-click to select everything from the current selection to the pointer, and control-click to add a single item to the selection. (In the terminology used elsewhere in FRED, only one object is really selected; the rest are just marked.)

Wings are listed in the box at the lower left of the window to make selecting them faster. There are buttons for All (select everything), Clear (select nothing), and Invert (swap the selected and unselected things).

Selection lock
This locks the currently marked object(s). This means you can't change what is marked (accidentally or otherwise) until you unlock. (Again, this is an inconsistent use of the word "selection".)

Form/disband wing
If you've got several identical ships marked, the left button lets you form them into a wing. If you've got a wing selected, the right button disbands it.

You can put as many as six ships in a wing, but only four in a Terran fighter or bomber wing

The tradition seems to be that Terran wings are named after Greek letters, Vasudan wings after (zodiacal) constellations, and Shivan wings after Hindu gods. (My Hindu mythology is a bit weak, so I've extended the last with names of Indian friends and colleagues.)

The HUD wingmen status guage only supports Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon wings. For a single player mission, the player should be in Alpha wing. For cooperative missions, all ships should be in Alpha, Beta, or Gamma. For team vs. team missions, they should be in Alpha or Zeta.

(Can the HUD handle Zeta wing?)

Ships in a wing want to stay together, and want to be in particular places within the wing. If you place them otherwise, they may crash into each other while maneuvering into place. The desired positioning is apparently:

  1
 2 3
4 5 6

James Diel helped compile the following lists:

Zoom buttons
The first button zooms the camera so that everything marked is in view. The second one zooms the camera so that all objects are in view.

Show distances
If more than one object is marked and this button is down, distances between objects will be displayed.

Rotate around object
When this is down, the keypad 2, 4, 6, and 8 keys rotate the camera around the selected ship.

Object list
This determines what type of object will be created by control-clicking.

As pointed out in the original documentation, the prefixes are:

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