Moving and Rotating with Grips

Moving and Rotating with Grips
As you’ve just seen, the Grips feature is an alternative method for editing your drawings. You’ve
already seen how you can stretch endpoints, but you can do much more with grips. The next exercise
demonstrates some other options. You’ll start by undoing the modifications you made in the preceding
exercise:
1. Type U↵. The copies of the stretched lines disappear.
2. Press ↵ again. The deformed door snaps back to its original form.
TIP Pressing ↵ at the Command prompt causes AutoCAD to repeat the last command entered—
in this case, U.
3. Select the entire door by first clicking a blank area below and to the right of the door.
4. Move the cursor to a location above and to the left of the rectangular portion of the door,
and click. Because you went from right to left, you created a crossing window. Recall that the
crossing window selects anything enclosed and crossing through the window.
5. Click the lower-left grip of the rectangle to turn it into a hot grip. Just as before, as you move
your cursor, the corner stretches.
6. Right-click, and choose Move from the shortcut menu. The Command window displays
the following:
**MOVE**
Specify move point or [Base point/Copy/Undo/eXit]
Now, as you move the cursor, the entire door moves with it.
7. Position the door near the center of the screen, and click. The door moves to the center of the
screen. Notice that the Command prompt returns, but the door remains highlighted, indicating
that it’s still selected for the next operation.
8. Click the lower-left grip again, right-click, and choose Rotate from the shortcut menu. The
Command window displays the following:
**ROTATE**
Specify rotation angle or [Base point/Copy/Undo/Reference/eXit]:
As you move the cursor, the door rotates about the grip point.
9. Position the cursor so that the door rotates approximately 180° (see Figure 2.19). Then,
Ctrl+click the mouse (hold down the Ctrl key, and press the left mouse button). A copy
of the door appears in the new rotated position, leaving the original door in place.



TIP You’ve seen how the Move command is duplicated in a modified way as a hot-grip command.
Other hot-grip commands (Stretch, Rotate, Scale, and Mirror) have similar counterparts in the
standard set of AutoCAD commands. You’ll see how those work in Chapters 12 and 14.
After you complete any operation by using grips, the objects are still highlighted with their grips
active. To clear the grip selection, press the Esc key.
In this exercise, you saw how hot-grip options appear in a shortcut menu. Several other options
are available in that menu, including Exit, Base Point, Copy, and Undo. You can also adjust an
object’s properties by using the Properties option.
You can access many of these grip edit options by pressing the spacebar or ↵ while a grip is
selected. With each press, the next option becomes active. The options then repeat if you continue
to press ↵. The Ctrl key acts as a shortcut to the Copy option. You have to use it only once; then, each
time you click a point, a copy is made.