Editing with Grips

Editing with Grips
Earlier, when you selected the door, grips appeared at the endpoints, center points, and midpoints
of the lines and arcs. You can use grips to make direct changes to the shape of objects or to quickly
move and copy them.
WARNING If you didn’t see grips on the door in the previous exercise, your version of AutoCAD
may have the Grips feature turned off. To turn them on, refer to the information on grips in
Appendix B.
So far, you’ve seen how operations in AutoCAD have a discrete beginning and ending. For
example, to draw an arc, you first issue the Arc command and then go through a series of operations,
including answering prompts and picking points. When you’re finished, you have an arc,
and AutoCAD is ready for the next command.
The Grips feature, on the other hand, plays by a different set of rules. Grips offer a small yet
powerful set of editing functions that don’t conform to the lockstep command/prompt/input
routine you’ve seen so far. As you work through the following exercises, it’s helpful to think of
grips as a subset of the standard method of operation in AutoCAD.
To practice using the Grips feature, you’ll make some temporary modifications to the door drawing.
Stretching Lines by Using Grips
In this exercise, you’ll stretch one corner of the door by grabbing the grip points of two lines:
1. Press the Esc key to make sure you’re not in the middle of a command. Click a point below
and to the left of the door to start a selection window.
2. Use the Zoom tool to adjust your view so the size of the door is similar to what is shown in
Figure 2.18.
3. Click above and to the right of the rectangular part of the door to select it.
4. Place the cursor on the lower-left corner grip of the rectangle, but don’t press the mouse button
yet. Notice that the cursor jumps to the grip point and that the grip changes color.
5. Move the cursor to another grip point. Notice again how the cursor jumps to it. When placed
on a grip, the cursor moves to the exact center of the grip point. This means, for example, that
if the cursor is placed on an endpoint grip, it’s on the exact endpoint of the object.
6. Move the cursor to the upper-left corner grip of the rectangle, and click. The grip becomes
a solid color and is now a hot grip. The prompt displays the following message:
**STRETCH**
Specify stretch point or [Base point/Copy/Undo/eXit]:
This prompt tells you that Stretch mode is active. Notice the options in the prompt. As you
move the cursor, the corner follows, and the lines of the rectangle stretch (see Figure 2.18).
TIP You can control the size and color of grips by using the Selection tab in the Options dialog box;
see Appendix B for details.


7. Move the cursor upward toward the top end of the arc, and click that point. The rectangle
deforms, with the corner placed at your pick point (see Figure 2.18).
Here you saw that a command called Stretch is issued by clicking a grip point. As you’ll see in
these next steps, a handful of other hot-grip commands are also available:
1. Notice that the grips are still active. Click the grip point that you moved before to make it a
hot grip again.
2. Right-click the mouse to open a shortcut menu that contains a list of grip edit options.


TIP When you click the joining grip point of two contiguous line segments, AutoCAD selects the
overlapping grips of two lines. When you stretch the corner away from its original location, the endpoints
of both lines follow.
3. Choose Base Point from the list, and then click a point to the right of the hot grip. Now, as
you move the cursor, the hot grip moves relative to the cursor.
4. Right-click again, choose Copy from the shortcut menu, and enter @1<-30↵. (Metric users should
enter @3<-30↵.) Instead of moving the hot grip and changing the lines, copies of the two lines are
made, with their endpoints 1 unit (or 3 units for metric users) below and to the right of the first
set of endpoints.
5. Pick another point just below the last. More copies are made.
6. Press ↵ or enter X↵ to exit Stretch mode. You can also right-click again and choose Exit from
the shortcut menu.
In this exercise, you saw that you can select a base point other than the hot grip. You also saw how
you can specify relative coordinates to move or copy a hot grip. Finally, you saw that with grips
selected on an object, right-clicking the mouse opens a shortcut menu that contains grip edit options.