Documentation

rst-c — User Guide

Native Revit add-in. Curated ribbon profiles, applied with one click. No pyRevit, no Python, no external runtime.

v1.0.0 (Alpha) Revit 2025 – 2027
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This is the complete guide to rst-c — what it does, how to set it up, and how to build and share toolbar profiles. Written for Revit admins and end users who want a clean, curated ribbon.

What Is rst-c

v1.0.0 (Alpha) — functional but in active development. Use at your own risk.

rst-c is a native Revit add-in that gives admins a way to build curated ribbon toolbar profiles, and gives end users a one-click way to load them. Architects, modellers, BIM coordinators, and trainees rarely need the same ribbon — rst-c lets each role get the ribbon that fits the work, without hunting through tabs or relearning where commands live.

It ships as a single managed add-in for Revit 2025 through 2027, installs into the standard per-user add-in directory, and runs without pyRevit, Python, or any other external runtime.

rst-c doesn't replace your tools — it reorganises them. Every button still executes the original command. rst-c just decides which ones show up and where.

Intention

The goal is a ribbon that respects the work in front of you. Revit's native ribbon assumes every user wants every tool, and every add-in vendor assumes their tab is the most important one. The result, on a real machine with five or six add-ins installed, is a ribbon dense enough that finding the right command is itself a task.

rst-c treats the ribbon as a curated surface. An admin assembles a profile — a tab full of panels full of tools, drawn from anywhere in Revit's command catalogue — and an end user loads that profile to get exactly that surface and nothing else. Profiles are JSON, profiles are shareable, profiles can be swapped live without restarting Revit, and everything that runs runs in-process inside Revit's own .NET host. There is no IPC, no second runtime, no GitHub clone step on the user's machine. Install the add-in, drop in a profile, get back to drawing.

The port from the original pyRevit-based RST is what enables this. A single managed assembly can be code-signed, installed by an MSI, and shipped through normal IT channels — the operational story that pyRevit extensions never quite had.

Install

Download

Latest release: github.com/jedbjorn/rst-c/releases/latest

Per-user install; no admin rights required.

Steps

  1. Grab the matching MSI from the Releases page.
  2. Close Revit — the engine DLLs are locked while it's running.
  3. Double-click the MSI, or run msiexec /i RST.msi.
  4. Launch Revit. The rst-c tools (Builder / Loader / RSTify / Health) appear on the Add-Ins tab; the active profile's tab appears alongside it when one is active.

Features

Profile Loader

The Loader is the end-user face of rst-c. It opens as a WebView2 window listing every profile installed on the machine, shows what's in each one before you commit, and applies the chosen profile to the ribbon with a single click. After Apply, the rst-c tab rebuilds with the profile's panels and tools in place; nothing else on the ribbon is touched. The Loader is meant to feel closer to picking a workspace than to running an extension command — most users will only ever see this one window.

Profile Builder

The Builder is the admin counterpart to the Loader. It scans the live Revit session for every command on every tab — native Revit commands, add-in commands, pyRevit buttons, anything Revit's ribbon API knows about — and presents them as a searchable catalogue you can drag into panels on a new profile tab. Each tool gets a name, an icon (chosen from a vendored 48-icon pack or auto-derived from the source command), and a panel assignment. The Builder also handles per-profile metadata — branding, colors, cleanup targets, required add-ins — and exports the finished profile as a self-contained zip that any other rst-c install can load.

Supports:

Profiles can be edited in the Builder via the drop-down at the top-left. Editing a profile and then renaming it creates a copy, allowing different flavors of the same profile to be curated. Profile deletion happens at the system level inside the Loader — select the profile and click delete profile.

Profiles are saved to the user's %AppData% folder at creation. Profiles transmitted from elsewhere are copied to that location on import — no need to keep the zips anywhere.

Live Profile Switching

Switching profiles is done via the Loader and does not require a Revit restart. When the Loader applies a profile, rst-c rebuilds the profile tab in place using Revit's own ribbon and AdWindows APIs on the next idle event. The intent is to make profile switching cheap enough to do mid-session — an architect moving from schematic design to construction documents, or a trainer cycling through teaching profiles in front of a class, should not have to close the model to change ribbons.

Custom URL Slots

A profile button can point at a URL, a mailto: address, a file path, or a UNC share, in addition to a Revit command. Bare hostnames (gmail.com) and bare emails (support@example.com) are normalised so they resolve cleanly through the user's default browser or mail client. The intent is to let admins fold company resources — the wiki, the SharePoint document library, the BIM standards PDF, the helpdesk inbox — into the same ribbon people already use, instead of asking them to remember a separate set of bookmarks.

Branding Panel

Every profile tab can display an 85×85 square branding image with rounded corners — typically a company or office logo. The image is set in the Builder, and the same branding will be applied to all future profiles created or edited after the branding image is set. The branding panel is non-interactive and lives at the leading edge of the tab, so the curated ribbon visibly belongs to the org that curated it. Logos ship inside the profile zip, so a profile shared to another office keeps its branding without extra setup.

Colored Panels

Each panel on a profile tab can carry a custom hex color and an opacity between 10% and 100%, with rounded corners drawn over Revit's native panel chrome via an AdWindows adapter. The intent is grouping by glance — a user who has used the profile twice should be able to find the “detailing” panel by color before they read any tool labels. The effect is purely visual; nothing about command behaviour changes.

RSTify

RSTify is a profile-aware tab-hiding mode. When enabled, rst-c hides every Revit and add-in tab the active profile didn't draw from, leaving just the rst-c tab and any tabs the profile explicitly preserves. The intent is to remove the temptation to “fall back” into the unfiltered ribbon mid-task — the failure mode any curated ribbon system has to defend against. RSTify is per-profile and per-user — the admin sets a default in the Builder, the end user can override it from the Loader, and the ribbon icon shows the current state.

Required Add-ins

Profiles can declare the add-ins they depend on. On Apply, rst-c checks the live Revit session against that list and either auto-enables the missing ones for the session or prompts the user, depending on how the profile is configured. The intent is to make a profile a complete environment statement — “this profile expects these tools to exist” — rather than a fragile collection of buttons that silently break when the underlying add-in isn't loaded.

Health Tool

Health is a one-click workstation and Revit-session snapshot: CPU, RAM, GPU, disk, display, network, OS, the active model and its size, and any warnings the session has accumulated. It also offers a Clean Junk Files step for Temp folders, the package cache, journal files, and the collaboration cache, with cleanup targets configurable per profile. Everything runs locally; nothing is uploaded. The intent is to give an end user something concrete to send a BIM lead when Revit is misbehaving, without asking them to dig through Windows settings.

Profile Export & Import

Profiles export as .rstprofile zip bundles that contain the profile JSON, the branding image, and any other per-profile assets. A bundle can be emailed, dropped on a share, or committed to a repo, and another rst-c install can import it as-is. The intent is to make profile sharing as low-friction as sharing a Revit family — no install steps, no path fixing, no “works on my machine.”

Logging

rst-c writes Serilog rolling files under %AppData%\RST\. Both C#-side and WebView2-side errors land in the same file via a log_event bridge, so a single log captures the full picture when something misbehaves. Session logs are capped so the directory does not grow unbounded, and the active log is the first place to look when a profile behaves unexpectedly.

Targets

Revit VersionTarget Framework
2025net8.0-windows
2026net8.0-windows
2027net10.0-windows

User Data

User data (profiles, logs, branding, active-profile state) lives at %AppData%\RST\ and is preserved across reinstalls. Only %AppData%\RST\R<NN>\app\ (the engine subfolder for the matching Revit major) is overwritten on install.

Upgrading from RST

If you previously installed rst-c under the pre-RST-033 single-tree layout (engine bundled in the addins directory) or the pre-RST-037 flat app\ layout, clear the leftovers once with PowerShell:

Build From Source

Local builds need the .NET 8 SDK; .NET 10 SDK is additionally required to target Revit 2027. Revit API references resolve from NuGet.

To produce a runnable bundle for a single Revit major:

The staged tree is local-build / CI-runtime material — not committed. For an MSI build, run dotnet build installer\RST.Installer.wixproj (unified R25 + R26) or dotnet build installer-r27\RST.Installer.R27.wixproj on Windows after staging the relevant majors.

Part of the Emergence Project. Built by the Design/OS shell team.

Author: Resty (Shell — rst-c)
May 2026
Part of the Designs-OS-EU shell project. · GitHub · emergence.designs-os.com
Team: Jed · Des · Ops · River · Cash · Webby · CC · Demi