Editing with Grips

Change geometry by dragging the small squares on a selected object — move an end, slide a whole line, resize a circle — with snaps, Ortho and typed values all working as you drag.

Grips are the small squares that appear on a selected object. They are handles: drag one and the object changes. There is no command to start and no dialog to fill in, which makes them the quickest way to adjust something you have already drawn.

The important part is that they are not a rough-and-ready tool. The drafting aids keep working while a grip moves, so you can snap a line's end exactly onto a circle's centre, or type @0,-5 to nudge a corner precisely 5 down.

Prerequisites

You can select objects — see Selecting Objects.

Where the grips are, and what each one does

Select an object, and squares appear at its ends, middles, centres or corners, depending on what kind of object it is.

Object	Grips, and what each does
Line	Ends move that end · Middle moves the whole line
Circle	Centre moves it · Quadrants change the radius
Arc	Centre moves it · Ends change where it starts and stops · Quadrant changes the radius
Polyline	Each corner moves that corner

A line, a circle, an arc and a polyline each selected in violet, with their grip squares visible at ends, middles, centres, quadrants and corners

Two ways to move a grip

1. Drag it

Press on the grip, drag, and release where you want it. Quick, visual, approximate — unless a snap catches, in which case it is exact.

2. Click it, then say where it goes

Click the grip once to pick it up. Then either click the destination, or type it:

@0,-5 moves it 5 down from where it was.
1200,600 sends it to that exact coordinate.

See Typing Coordinates and Values for the full vocabulary.

This second way is usually better for exact work, because you get every typed form rather than whatever you can hit with the mouse.

💡 Workflow Guide: Selecting a line, clicking its end grip, typing @0,-300 and pressing Enter so that end moves exactly 300 down while the other end stays put

The drafting aids keep working while you drag

This is what makes grips genuinely useful rather than merely handy:

Object snaps pull the grip onto real points of other geometry — an endpoint, a midpoint, a centre, a crossing.
Ortho (F8) keeps the move exactly horizontal or vertical.
Polar (F10) holds it to your angle steps.
Grid snap (F9) lands it on the grid.
Holding Shift flips Ortho for that moment.

So "drag this wall's end until it meets that one exactly" takes about two seconds: select, drag the end grip, let the Endpoint snap catch, release.

Nudging without dragging

With objects selected and nothing running, the arrow keys nudge the whole selection by one grid snap step.

Handy for small corrections where dragging would overshoot.

When grips do not appear

What you see	Why
A selection shows no grips at all	More than 1,000 objects are selected. Grips are suppressed above that, deliberately, to keep large selections responsive — the selection itself is fine
An object will not select	Its layer is locked
An object is not there to select	Its layer is off or frozen

See Working with Layers.

Grips, or a proper command?

Grips are for quick, local, visual adjustments. Reach for a command when you want:

The same exact change across many objects — Move, Copy, Rotate, Scale, Mirror.
To set a length by number — Lengthen (LE).
To drag a whole region's ends at once — Stretch (ST), which moves the ends that fall inside a crossing box and leaves everything else anchored.
To reshape a polyline properly — Polyline Edit (PE).

See Cleaning Up Sketches.

Next Steps

Next: Moving and Duplicating a Selection

Editing with Grips

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