Moving/positioning object intuitively and precisely

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Moving/positioning object intuitively and precisely

GlowingObject
I'm just beginning to trying to learn LibreCAD. Something that troubles me greatly is just moving entities. The most intuitive way to move an object is to just grab it and drag it around. But:

- you first need to select the object, and then you need to click again and aim your mouse pointer carefully to hit any lines of the object, or clicking will enter selection mode instead of drag mode
- the object position is offset to the object's origin: basically the object will move a little bit when moving, and you have to move it back to compensate
- it can happen that you accidentally drag only a single point (e.g. polygon node) instead of the entire object, depending on the entity type
- when the object is a block, you will only see a bounding box of the moved object, instead of its full detail

This seems all clumsy and inconvenient. The "Move/Copy" tool is a bit better at this. At least you don't need to "aim" anymore when you want to drag an object. But:

- you still need to select the object first, then activate the move tool, and it's easy to get confused which tool is active currently
- it still doesn't render a good "preview" while dragging
- when done, a confirmation dialog is shown, which doesn't seem very useful and interrupts the flow; the dialog lets you choose whether to make copies - why isn't making copies just a separate tool?

Isn't there a way to just select and drag objects freely in one click? Every diagram editor works like this. (Maybe there's a good reason that CAD normally doesn't need or want this?)

Once the objects are placed coarsely, I need exact placement. Intuitively I'd prefer something like an edit field that shows the coordinates of the object, and where I can just change the numbers to exactly what I need. Does LibreCAD offer this functionality? I know there's a command line, where you can move or place entities by exact numeric coordinates, but its usefulness seems limited in this particular use case.
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Re: Moving/positioning object intuitively and precisely

fa201
Drafting is based on accuracy. When you move an object, it is very common to select a reference point which is a particular point of the geometry (intersections, extremities, centers, etc.) and to decide on which other particular point it should go.

For the flow, I can understand some of the concerns. Maybe the developpers will come up with some historical rationale behind this.
Fabrice

French hobbyist interested in 2D design.
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Re: Moving/positioning object intuitively and precisely

flywire
In reply to this post by GlowingObject
I agree this is fundamental and unintuitive for users experienced with other drawing apps. It would be worth explaining in https://librecad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guides/dwg-edit.html#modifying-entities.