What if drag to move had snap options?

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
1

TL;DR: It would be nice if dragging to move were snappy, like the snappy gumball (see point #5 for the full wish)

Move is probably everyone’s most used command, and therefore one of the commands that would most benefit from efficiency tweaks. Right now there are several good options:

1. Move with an Alias (I used Cmd A, the easiest key to reach) - great for point to point

2. Constrained Move (I use AA and SFEC as an imagined “+” sign on the keyboard) set to the Aliases:

! _Move _Pause _Pause _Along r0,0,0 r0,1,0 - these are AAE or AAC
! _Move _Pause _Pause _Along r0,0,0 r1,0,0 - these are AAS or AAF
! _Move _Pause _Pause _Along r0,0,0 r0,0, 1 - these are AAD

This is useful to allow you to move up and down similar to autoCAD without having to click the gumball (higher tolerance for mis-clicking as well)

3. Align Move - hugely useful when shortcutted properly. I use

AS - Left
AF - Right
AE - Top
AC - Bottom
AD - Concentric
ADF or ADS - HorizCenter
ADE or ADC - VertCenter

With these, especially when drawing, you don’t even have to be near your curve to align it. I have considered automating this further by adding group/ungroup to the Macro, but haven’t tried it yet. Ideally there would be a setting within align where you align the whole selection or individual selections.

  1. Snappy Gumball - very powerful but I almost never use it. I find that the gumball puts too much functionality into a small space and its easy to mis-click and scale or rotate your object, and I get what I want more efficiently with Align most of the time.

This brings me to my idea:

  1. Drag Move - I think this has unrealized potential. It’s the most intuitive way to move an object or curve, and if snaps could be added it could be very precise and efficient.

One option could be only snapping using the point where you clicked on the object, a second could be snapping using all object control points, and a third could be using the object’s implicit bounding box as a set of snap points. If this were implemented, I think it could potentially replace typing move or using a shortcut (option 1) in many cases, eliminating a step and making this often used command more efficient, thereby saving everyone a few seconds over and over until we all get to take a coffee break :wink:

2

This already works and has since Rhino 6 or so. If you have Osnaps enabled, and you LMB mouse down near a snappable place on a selected object, it will snap there, and you can then drag the object and snap it somewhere else.

3

Thanks Mitch, on my current Rhino 8 the drag from point to point alignment works sporadically and there also doesn’t seem to be a clear way to distinguish between moving the whole object from the point and moving the control point. Any ideas on this?

4

Yes, turn off the option of questionable utility to turn on control points when an object is selected…

5

So I’ve tried recording what I was experiencing and realized what the issue was. I have the mouse set to a larger size (size 4), so it runs into an error where it looks like you’re clicking on the point, but you’re a little too far away for Rhino to pick up on it. Is there a way to increase the tolerance a little bit so this feature works with a larger pointer size?

note: the screen capture resets the mouse to a default size so it looks obviously off, but with the bigger size it’s harder to tell