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Inspiring
June 24, 2012
Open for Voting

P: Ability to toggle pixel grid snapping on/off for vector tools using a keyboard shortcut

  • June 24, 2012
  • 14 replies
  • 821 views

As a UI designer I toggle the Snap to pixelgrid option on and off many times per day. This feature requires a easy override shortcut instead of being hidden in preferences. Maybe by adding ctrl to the move shortcuts for example?

14 replies

Participating Frequently
October 19, 2012
The new pixel snapping feature in CS6 is great and something I've waited for for about 15 years. So great that it's finally in the product! There is one problem with it though. There is no quick way to switch it on/off. Now you have to go into Preferences and tick the checkbox every time which is very time consuming when you work as a designer and use shape layers and need to move anchor points either by pixel snapping or freely.

I have a little trick that kind of solves the problem and that is that I have created two actions, one for turning pixel snapping on and one for turning it off and I have attached keyboard shortcuts to those actions so it's fairly quick to switch.

This is something you, as a designer, need to be able to turn on/off very often in your workflow. For example when you want to adjust an icon shape.
What I would expect was for example that I could hold down a keyboard key while dragging a point to move an anchor point freely, if I didn't it would snap to pixel. This doesn't seem to be the case though. You need to either turn it on or off in preferences which really slows down the workflow.

Inspiring
August 1, 2012
I'm constantly turning vector tool snapping on and off, we need an easy way to access this. A check box in the top panel is needed.
Inspiring
June 24, 2012
Hey chris, yeah. i had heard before of the designers saying that.. It seriously blew my mind.. I guess they never designed UI elements using vectors or slightly scaling a vector logo and then tweaking it to pixel-perfection (a very common use-case...) It's a real shame and hope this will be reconsidered for a .x update.

I do use an action right now but i'd be much more productive with a better solution.

Cheers!
Inspiring
June 24, 2012
Our UI designers insisted that nobody would ever want to turn it off. :-/
(seriously, it was a big argument to keep any switch for it)

For the time being, you can record an action that will turn it on or off, and assign keys to those actions.