[Affinity Designer] How to combat accidental copying of object by CTRL + click

[JOleg]

Hi guys,

(Windows 10, Affinity Designer v1.10.5, desktop)

So I have a workflow where I use groups a lot. To go straight to some object within a group I click CTRL + left-mouse click. Then after sometime I realize it made a copy. I only see this when I make changes to objects afterwards because then they overlap and everything looks off. 

But it's not only that, when 2 identical objects are one over another (e.g. text), they become bold-er, but that I usually don't manage to notice after accidental copying.

This has become a real problem for me, I make around 10+ such accidental copies a day.

I guess the core problem is that AffinityDesigner allows copying 2 ways:

1) With nothing selected: CTRL + left-click object + drag it

2) With object selected: ALT + left-click object + drag it

 

But my interaction with object starts with selecting the object by CTRL + left-click (which as you see is half-way through copying routine), but somehow AD registers slight mouse movement (obviously) and creates a copy underneath that I do not notice until later in the day.

I know about double-clicking solution, but that's not an option for me, I have groups within groups and so on. Clicking mouse 6+ times just to get to the object is not an option.

How do I combat this? I have more such small nuances which slow my productivity, but those are for later discussions.

P.S. There's a chance I make copies somehow differently, but then I have no idea how. When I purposefully try to recreate "accidental copying" I can barely do that. That's just my assumption that it's CTRL + left-click + drag. In any case, I would rather not have it copy with CTRL + click, because a "standard" combination in the industry is ALT + left-click + drag.

Oleg

[JOleg]

Okay, here's what I did. I extracted a History panel to the left, next to the toolbars so I could see every action I make. So far this occurred 2 times from the moment of making my initial post, and actions I did was CTRL + click, just as I described. Very painful. Sometimes I catch myself editing a duplicate and I'm like "what's going on here, I thought I already fixed this...". You can imagine the mess with hidden duplicates. Today I even noticed I copied a group which had 70% of the entire page...

[NathanC]

Hi @JOleg,

The copying of files via CTRL + left click drag and ALT + left click drag serve different purposes, the Ctrl drag honours snapping whilst Alt drag is not bound by snapping. I can see your query has been raised previously however as far as i'm aware there isn't a way to disable this. Perhaps another user may have a suggestion, If not it may be worth posting this in the Feature Requests and Suggestions Board.

[walt.farrell]

If you are having problems because you're accidentally dragging rather than clicking, possibly there's some adjustment to your Mouse performance parameters that would help? Or possibly you need to replace your mouse? Other than that, I can only suggest selecting via the Layers panel, rather than by clicking on the canvas.

[JOleg]

Thank you for the responses!

Well, apart from honoring snapping, CTRL + click copies, that's not what I want, I have ALT + click-drag for copying for that purpose. I could always copy first (with ALT) and then just move (so snapping would be engaged). But having CTRL + click do both copying and snap-honoring, results in unwanted copies, and that's not helping me work.

Walt, the mouse is perfectly fine, I work in a lot of technical software, and it's just Affinity's particularity. Selecting via Layers panel is not an option as well, that's searching through a long hierarchy, thus loosing time. That's a simple task - just select an object. And I want to spend milliseconds doing so.

AD has certain configurations in the preferences, like e.g. "Move Tool Aspect Constrain" which I've set to "Do not constrain by default" because that's exactly what I expect, otherwise behavior changes randomly. It would be really nice to have something like this option which said "Deep Object selection" : "Do not copy when dragged by default".

I guess I'll post this in the Feature Requests then.

[prophet]

I deal with this little quirk by starting to drag first and then adding the modifier I want while still dragging.

[Old Bruce]

9 hours ago, JOleg said:

So I have a workflow where I use groups a lot. To go straight to some object within a group I click CTRL + left-mouse click.

Here on Mac a simple double click will get me to that object after a single click to select the group.

[JOleg]

29 minutes ago, prophet said:

I deal with this little quirk by starting to drag first and then adding the modifier I want while still dragging.

Mmm, but I don't need to drag, I just need to select. And dragging causes a duplicate which I don't know how to deal with.

Quote

Here on Mac a simple double click will get me to that object after a single click to select the group.

I have several nested levels of groups, it's not just "select a group and double click", it's more like 3-4 double clicks, so up to 6-8 clicks in a row to get to the object

[Old Bruce]

9 hours ago, JOleg said:

but somehow AD registers slight mouse movement

<Pedant on>

It is the OS that polls the mouse.

<Pedant off>

[prophet]

10 minutes ago, JOleg said:

Mmm, but I don't need to drag, I just need to select.

Ah, sorry I misunderstood.