Can you prioritize certain Osnap filters over others?

I typically like to have about 5-6 filters active at any time. Typically this combination works great for me.

However, most of the time, I need center more than the other snaps. It almost seems to be the lowest priority, as it virtually never appears for me unless it’s the only setting I have on. Basically, it never appears if the other settings are enabled. I’m constantly needing to either:

(A) Run AreaCentroid on every object to find its center, and then connect the dots…
(B) Constantly isolate the Center setting on, and then turn the others back on…

Is there a way to somehow make CENTER weighted to like 70%, so that I have to “hunt” for other settings as opposed to constantly hunting for center?

There’s something you need to know about the center snap that took me quite a while to realize; maybe you haven’t stumbled across it yet?

You need to position your mouse cursor within one snap radius of the CIRCLE (or arc) you want to snap to the center of, not near where you think the circle center is.

Then the center osnap popup will show near the center of the circle and when you click to select it will select the center, even though your cursor is at the circle line.

If you are already aware of this I can’t be of much further help because it’s always worked well for me.

From the developer:

The priority of the Object snaps from weakest to strongest for the past 20+ years has been:

Near, Center, Vertex, Knot, Quadrant, Midpoint, Intersection, End, Perpendicular, Tangent, Point.

However, the main factor for deciding which Osnap is activated is the visual distance from the cursor to the snap locations. Rhino always snaps to the visually closest snap location unless the snap is one of the two weakest ones that are basically variants of near snap, Near and Center.

While we could change the priority of the snaps to try to solve a problem with one user, I’m pretty sure it would not make much difference.

We have mechanisms for making sure you get the snap location you want. You can turn off some persistent snaps to make sure they don’t get activated, or you can use one-shot osnaps, for example in this case End to make sure only endpoints are even snapped to.

Center Osnap is way too insolent while trying to snap to the midpoint of the straight section of a rectangle or a square. I think that it must have less priority on curves that are non-rational (i.e. not true arcs and circles).

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totally agree with that.

Maybe you are already doing this but you can Right-Click on the Center checkbox snap, and it will automatically turn all other off and just let Center On. To go back to previous settings, you just need to Right-Click again.

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strongly recommended:
-> use one shot object Snap.


-> turn on End / Mid only,
-> if you hover the Check-Boxes-Text Near Cen Int Perp … together with shift you get a single featured “one shot” object Snap, or you can use the “Osnap” Palett (also “one shots”).

(a pity the one shot feature is not nicely implemented in the Mac-Version)
For teaching reasons with classes Mac/Pc i use the osnap palette.
If i work for my own, i use the “shift = one shot” workflow.

best - tom

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