Move, Rotate, and Scale

Move, Rotate, and Scale all follow the same pattern: select something first (with the Select tool, Space), then activate the tool and place two or three reference points. If nothing is selected, the tool reminds you in a toast.

All three show a live ghost preview of the result and a live readout, and all three accept typed exact values mid-gesture.

Select (Space)

A quick refresher, since every transform starts here:

• Click an object, sketch, or guide to select it. Clicking empty space clears the selection.
• Shift-click adds to or removes from the selection.
• Drag to rubber-band a selection, SketchUp-style: dragging left→right draws a solid rectangle and selects what falls entirely inside it; dragging right→left draws a dashed rectangle and selects everything the rectangle touches. Hold Shift to add the result to the current selection; Esc cancels a drag in progress.
• Select All (⌘A / Ctrl+A, or Edit ▸ Select All) selects every visible object, group, component, and free-standing sketch — the whole model. Inside a group’s editing context it selects that group’s contents instead.
• Double-click a group, component, or object to enter its editing context (the rest of the scene dims); press Esc to step back out.

Move (M)

1. Click a base point. Pick a meaningful one, like a corner you want to land somewhere.
2. Click the destination. The base point lands exactly there, snapping to anything the inference engine finds.

Exact distance: after the base point, type a length (1.5m, 8") and press Enter — the selection moves exactly that far in the direction you were dragging (or along the locked axis).

Axis locking: hold Shift to lock to the dominant axis of your drag, or press → for X, ← for Y, ↑ for Z (↓ clears). The preview line takes the axis color.

Copy instead of move: hold Option/Alt while committing — the original stays put and a copy lands at the destination, with the readout prefixed “Copy ·”. The copy becomes the new selection, so repeated Alt-moves chain copies one after another.

Rotate (Q)

Rotate puts a protractor — a round dial — under your cursor. The dial lies in the plane you’ll rotate in, and its color is the axis you’ll spin around: blue on the ground (vertical Z), red for X, green for Y, or purple for an off-axis face. As you move over the model the dial tilts to whatever face or edge is under the cursor, so you can see the axis before you commit to it.

1. Hover until the dial shows the axis you want, then click the pivot (the center of rotation).
2. Click a reference point to define the zero direction.
3. Sweep to the new angle and click to commit. A dim arm marks 0° and a colored arm tracks the live angle.

Locking the axis. Hold Shift to lock the dial to the axis it’s currently showing — it renders solid, with a short stub along the axis, so the lock is obvious. Or force a world axis outright: → X, ← Y, ↑ Z; ↓ clears the lock and goes back to following faces. Locking with an arrow is how you rotate something that offers no face to aim at — tipping a cylinder onto its side, say: hover it, press ← or → to lock a horizontal axis, then pick your two points.

The live angle snaps to 15° increments as you sweep. For any other angle, type degrees (e.g. 22.5, negative allowed) and press Enter.

Scale (S)

1. Click a base point.
2. Move away from or toward the selection’s center and click to commit. The readout shows the factor (×1.50).

Scaling is uniform, about the selection’s bounding-box center. For an exact factor, type it (0.5, 2.54) and press Enter; factors must be positive. Non-uniform (per-axis) scaling is on the roadmap.

What transforms apply to

Move, Rotate, and Scale act on the whole selection: an object, a group (with everything inside it), a component instance (each instance transforms independently), a free-standing sketch — or any multi-selection of these at once. Select All followed by Move relocates an entire model in one gesture, and the whole act is a single undo step. Multi-selections scale about the selection’s overall bounding-box center. The one multi-selection caveat: an Option/Alt copy-move duplicates each solid but plain-moves any sketches in the selection (sketches have no copy support yet), and undoing a multi-copy takes one undo per copied node.

Deleting

Delete or Backspace removes the current selection with any tool active. The contextual dock’s Erase button and Edit ▸ Delete do the same. Deleting is undoable, like everything else — ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z undoes, ⇧⌘Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes, across the entire document history.