Command to make two objects switch position

[n_shcherbakov]

Changing the objects in the original post is no problem, especially if the flip commands are assigned to the mouse. It's a matter of seconds. The more complicated examples you've cited here require not just a "swap" button, but a more advanced tool, like the "Find and Replace" plugin from Astute Graphics for Illustrator. 

Maybe it's not worth the time, because if they bring us scripting, the same AG will make their own plugins for Affinity products as well (somewhere they already mentioned it). 

[Peter Werner]

13 hours ago, GarryP said:

To try and make myself a bit more clear, I wasn’t suggesting that the rotation/skew/flipped-ness of the layers would be swapped.
I mentioned them because each operation changes at least some of the coordinates of the layer.

Thank you for taking the time to clarify.

My intuitive assumption would be that such a command would operate with respect to the effective bounding box, with all transforms except translation basically "baked".

I think your post also serves to illustrate another reason why the naive approach of copy/pasting coordinates may not yield the desired result in all cases.

Another question that arises is what should happen if the two objects are children of other objects, such as members of groups. In this case, I would assume that they also swap position in the document hierarchy.

[Peter Werner]

9 hours ago, n_shcherbakov said:

Changing the objects in the original post is no problem, especially if the flip commands are assigned to the mouse.

I have to say, your process is pretty quick that way! Still, I think it would require someone to think about the problem for and extended amount of time or research it and then to add custom shortcuts for two commands to get there. Selecting might also be a bit slower in a complex real-life situation with more objects around, and the object would stay in the same position in the document hierarchy. Nevertheless I think this is the quickest solution we have so far.

I'm sure something along the lines of the Find & Replace plugin you mention will pop up very quickly as soon as we have an API. But it seems more suited for automating more complex tasks. It looks to me like using that to quickly swap two objects would take a similar amount of time as doing it manually would. But then again I have never used that plugin.

[Paul Chiswick]

Here's 3 macros to do the job. Select both objects before running macro. Sometimes one of the different planes macros doesn't do the right thing . . . just try the other!

Swap object positions.afmacros

[JamieT]

I lost the will to live, reading all these workarounds. Yes, definitely want it! Not sure if it’s in InDesign these days but it wasn’t back in 2015 so I wrote a JavaScript script to do it.