Do you find yourself frequently lengthening or resizing objects? Or what about copying or moving and then rotating an object? Do you wish you could use one command to perform both a copy and scale? Do you wish you could stretch, move, copy, rotate, scale, or mirror objects without either typing the commands or clicking the ribbon? Then, it's time to look at grips or maybe you already use grips and are looking for some new techniques.
Grips are small squares, rectangles, and triangles that appear on selected objects. You can stretch, move, copy, rotate, scale, and mirror objects using grips without having to enter any commands.
First, let's make sure grips are on.
Grip modes are the editing options that you can use when grips are selected. The default grip mode is STRETCH. Once you select an object's grip, each time you press the Spacebar or Enter, the next mode becomes active. The grip mode order is:
Let's try cycling through the grip modes. For these examples we'll use the Spacebar to change the grip mode, but Enter works as well.
There is a square grip at each end and one at the midpoint.
It changes color to indicate it's selected.
The line segment stretches as you move the cursor. The stretch is temporary until you select a point.
Notice that the command prompt now shows you're in the move mode.
Again, until you specify a destination point the action is temporary. You can press ESC at any time to exit the action.
The command prompt indicates the current mode. You can move the cursor to confirm the mode. Eventually you cycle back to the stretch mode.
Now a copy is made while stretching, moving, rotating, scaling, or mirroring. Keep selecting destination points to create multiple copies while in any of the grip modes.
Try these same steps with arcs, circles, and polylines, selecting different grips on the various objects.
The grip you select is the base point for the current grip mode. You can use the base point option to change this during any of the grip modes.
When using grips, you can stay in the grip mode and make multiple copies of an object. Let's use rotation as an example.
Notice the line is rotated and copied from the original line, not the previous copy.
Now we can take it a step further. Let's say you have an object that you want to copy multiple times, and you want the rotation angle to be the same between each successive object.
This becomes the angle for the rotation snap for each copy.
Your cursor snaps to 30-degree angles as you drag it.
Like the snap rotation example, you can use a distance as a move snap while copying with grips.
The preceding copy you made defined the snap distance for any subsequent copies made while holding Ctrl.
Instead of selecting a grip as in the previous exercise, just hover the cursor over a grip. A menu displays with actions associated with the grip. Depending on the object selected, and the grip, the menu options will vary. Not all grips have grip menus. Grips with menus are called multifunctional grips.
There may be times when you want to select more than one grip at a time. Say you want to stretch from two or more grips while not affecting the geometry between those grips.
System Variable | Description | Default Value | Saved In |
---|---|---|---|
DYNINFOTIPS | Controls whether tips are displayed for using Shift and Ctrl when editing with grips. | 1 | Registry |
GRIPBLOCK | Controls the display of grips in blocks. | 0 | Registry |
GRIPCOLOR | Controls the color of unselected grips. | 150 | Registry |
GRIPCONTOUR | Controls the color of the grip outline. | 251 | Registry |
GRIPDYNCOLOR | Controls the color of custom grips for dynamic blocks. | 140 | Registry |
GRIPHOT | Controls the color of selected grips. | 12 | Registry |
GRIPHOVER | Controls the fill color of an unselected grip when the cursor pauses over it. | 11 | Registry |
GRIPMULTIFUNCTIONAL | Specifies the access methods for multifunctional grip options. | 3 (bitcode) | Registry |
GRIPOBJLIMIT | Suppresses the display of grips when the selection set includes more than the specified number of objects. | 100 | Registry |
GRIPS | Controls the display of grips on selected objects. | 2 | Registry |
GRIPSIZE | Sets the size of the grip box, in device independent pixels. | 5 | Registry |
GRIPSUBOBJMODE | Controls whether grips are automatically made hot when subobjects are selected. | 1 (bitcode) | Registry |
GRIPTIPS | Controls the display of grip tips when the cursor hovers over grips on dynamic blocks and custom objects that support grip tips. | 1 | Registry |