Selection & transforms
Updated v2.4.4At a glance
- Click, shift-add, and marquee selection — window (left-to-right) vs crossing (right-to-left)
- On-canvas handles for move, rotate, uniform or axis stretch, and mirror
- Stretching a circle into an oval re-forms the curve at its new size, so it stays smooth
- HUD strip for precise X/Y, incremental rotation, mirror toggles, and width/height when you want numbers
- Drags run at full frame rate on dense artwork, and Escape cancels a drag mid-gesture
- Arrow keys nudge the selection; Shift+arrow for larger steps
Selection works the way the CAM workspaces do: click a shape to select it (clicking anything inside a group selects the whole group), Shift+click to add — or remove, if it's already selected — and drag a marquee for the rest. Drag left to right for a window selection (blue, fully enclosed only); drag right to left for a crossing selection (blue-green, anything the box touches). Crossing tests real edges, so passing the box through a filled interior doesn't grab it.
On-canvas handles
A selected unit gets a dashed box with handles that stay the same screen size at any zoom (and spread out into a padded 3x3 layout when you're zoomed way back). Corner squares scale both axes; the arc arrows outside each corner rotate; the center square moves; edge-center handles stretch one axis. Hold Shift on an edge handle (or close the HUD lock) to scale uniformly from the opposite edge instead. In a multi-select, each shape shows its own faint box and one union box is the transform target — the whole selection moves, scales, and rotates as a unit.
Stretching a circle or ellipse is curve-aware: instead of stretching a fixed outline, the shape re-forms itself at the new size, so a small circle dragged out into a wide oval stays smooth and cuts cleanly. (Rotating or skewing a curve bakes it into a plain outline, as before.)
Every drag gesture — move, rotate, scale, skew — runs at full frame rate no matter how dense the design or how much of it you grabbed; the geometry commits once when you release the button, and the HUD numbers track live the whole way. Pressing Escape mid-drag cancels the gesture and puts everything back where it started.
The HUD, when you want numbers
Whenever something is selected, the top strip shows X / Y (absolute center position), Δ°
(incremental rotation — positive is clockwise, and the field clears after each apply), Mirror X /
Mirror Y buttons that flip the geometry immediately, and W / H with an aspect lock. Typing a
width or height scales the selection's bounding box to that exact size; with the lock closed one
dimension drives uniform scale. Next to them, W% / H% scale relative to the current size —
type 50 to halve, 50 again to quarter — then snap back to 100. All length fields accept
expressions and follow your preferred units.
Nudge and group
Arrow keys nudge the selection by one screen pixel's worth of model space at the current zoom;
Shift+arrow moves 10x that. Cmd/Ctrl+G groups the selection, Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+G ungroups, and
Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+G ungroups all nesting at once. Align, Distribute, and Arrange tools in the toolbar
handle edge/center alignment and even spacing across a multi-select.