Touch & hold: Include Duplicate instead of just Copy, Paste

[shushustorm]

Hey everyone!

When I want to duplicate a selection, I have to touch & hold twice, each time waiting for the menu to appear, just to select "Copy" once and "Paste" once. It'd be better to just be able to select "Duplicate" within the very same menu. It gets exhausting when doing this often.

Best wishes,
Shu

[BarKeegan]

You can duplicate with touch controls alone, no need for menus; is that what you were looking for?

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, BarKeegan said:

You can duplicate with touch controls alone, no need for menus; is that what you were looking for?

If you ‘long press’ (i.e. touch and hold) you get a ‘Copy’ option on the context menu that pops up, and you also get a ‘Paste’ option if there is suitable content on the clipboard. What you don’t get is a ‘Duplicate’ option, which means you have to invoke the context menu twice: once to copy and a second time to paste. Apart from the inefficiency, this means you overwrite the previous contents of the clipboard.

[BarKeegan]

Isn’t this what we’re talking about though 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Alfred]

No, that’s ’Duplicate and transform’. It’s not an uncommon requirement to duplicate an object in place (e.g. to create a semi-transparent copy to lighten or darken for highlights and shadows).

[BarKeegan]

Ah, they wanted to copy in the same space, I see

[RM f/g]

Doesn't cmd/ctrl + J do the trick?

Guess not...

[shushustorm]

Thanks for the replies! I wasn't aware of a gesture for duplicating. If that's indeed "Duplicate and Transform", however, that only works in quite specific cases, when I want to arrange something with equal distances. cmd + J on a Mac will trigger the same behaviour. Besides, I don't use a keyboard on my iPad. So unfortunately, I guess there currently isn't a simple workaround.

[ronnyb]

15 hours ago, shushustorm said:

Thanks for the replies! I wasn't aware of a gesture for duplicating. If that's indeed "Duplicate and Transform", however, that only works in quite specific cases, when I want to arrange something with equal distances. cmd + J on a Mac will trigger the same behaviour. Besides, I don't use a keyboard on my iPad. So unfortunately, I guess there currently isn't a simple workaround.

Have you tried duplicating the layer in the layers panel? It's not as intuitive as having a Duplicate in Place tap-and-hold pop-up menu item, but perhaps it can make it a little bit more efficient for you... 

[shushustorm]

7 hours ago, ronnyb said:

Have you tried duplicating the layer in the layers panel? It's not as intuitive as having a Duplicate in Place tap-and-hold pop-up menu item, but perhaps it can make it a little bit more efficient for you... 

Thanks for the suggestion! May work in some cases! Most of the time, though, I am just selecting objects directly without looking them up from the layers menu. So I'd have to enable and disable the menu and dig there for the shape I'm looking for. However, in some cases, if I need to duplicate a lot, it sure makes sense!

[ronnyb]

5 hours ago, shushustorm said:

Thanks for the suggestion! May work in some cases! Most of the time, though, I am just selecting objects directly without looking them up from the layers menu. So I'd have to enable and disable the menu and dig there for the shape I'm looking for. However, in some cases, if I need to duplicate a lot, it sure makes sense!

Great, there’s also a small icon in the lower left of the layers panel on the desktop version for automatically selecting the layer name in the layer panel, which makes it a bit easier to find in a long layer stack. I’m not on the iPad app right now, but if you check the preferences for the iPad version I believe there’s a switch for enabling that as well, but I’m not 100% sure where off the top of my head. You can leave the layers panel pinned open if that helps…

[shushustorm]

On 2/9/2022 at 6:12 AM, ronnyb said:

Great, there’s also a small icon in the lower left of the layers panel on the desktop version for automatically selecting the layer name in the layer panel, which makes it a bit easier to find in a long layer stack. I’m not on the iPad app right now, but if you check the preferences for the iPad version I believe there’s a switch for enabling that as well, but I’m not 100% sure where off the top of my head. You can leave the layers panel pinned open if that helps…

Thanks! That's great to have in general, but I don't typically name my layers! (As far as I can tell, I'd have to do that to search for a layer name?)

Also, but just as a side note, I have seen this being present in Photo, so I thought I might use that for some of the work, but it will apply the last transform action as well, not duplicate in place, unfortunately.

[shushustorm]

When you're working on hundreds of files and you're sitting through hours of
- Saving files individually (Designer) (no save all possible)
- Wait for each save
- Closing files individually (Designer) (no close all possible)
- Confirm each closing
- Opening the files (Photo)
- Editing the files (Photo) and again,
- Saving files individually (Photo)
- Wait for each save
- Closing files individually (Photo)
- Confirm each closing
- Opening the files (Designer)
, just because there is no "Duplicate" in the context menu in Designer, but only in Photo and despite that insane detour, you're still faster.

Needless to say, haven't found a decent way to do this in Designer.

[evtonic3]

I'm looking for freehand select of pixels and move them on the fly. Like in Procreate. In the same layer without fiddling with copy paste duplicate and everything else. Procreate has this right.