Locking Guides discussion (split)

[retrograde]

8 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

Just wondering why theres no lock guides in Designer?

Lock guides should be easy to implement, I would assume.

[Patrick Connor]

On 11/21/2018 at 5:11 PM, retrograde said:

Lock guides should be easy to implement, I would assume.

Easy enough to implement, just needs placing carefully in the UI. 

[retrograde]

29 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Easy enough to implement, just needs placing carefully in the UI. 

Couldn't a simple key short handle that?

[Patrick Connor]

55 minutes ago, retrograde said:

Couldn't a simple key short handle that?

You would still want a visual indication of the current state, so either drawn differently or cursor change when hover over or a button/check box showing the current state. The problem with a key short-circuit or toolbar button or checkbox is that it assumes all guides are locked or unlocked whereas long term you may want to lock individual ones so each would need to draw its own state.

[lepr]

.

[Patrick Connor]

17 minutes ago, >|< said:

Wouldn't it be enough for guides to be locked by default and to require a modifier key to be depressed to allow responding to dragging?

Works for me... (After initial placement). The Development teams have given this a lot more thought than me though...

[retrograde]

2 hours ago, >|< said:

Wouldn't it be enough for guides to be locked by default and to require a modifier key to be depressed to allow responding to dragging?

Works for me as well.

[lepr]

.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Patrick Connor said:

Works for me... (After initial placement). The Development teams have given this a lot more thought than me though...

What if there is no modifier key & guides always are locked on the canvas after placement? Since we can now move a guide with any tool selected by dragging the guide on the ruler, & we are unlikely to do that by accident, wouldn't that be enough?

[lepr]

.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, >|< said:

I'd rather not be forced to move the pointer to a ruler and then drag from there in order to move an existing guide.

Personally, I would rather do that than have to use some awkward combo of modifier keys to unlock & move the guide with the Move Tool. I am not certain but I think it would have to be a combination of some sort since most modifier keys already are assigned to a Move Tool function. Also, the Windows apps have one less available modifier key than the Mac ones & for both this would have to be compatible with drawing tablet inputs.

It just seems to add unneeded complications vs. a straightforward, no-key-needed ruler drag to me, but YMMV.

[A_B_C]

Let me ask a somewhat awkward question. Does the guides system get a deep rewrite at the moment? If not, I would believe that a simple menu entry with a shortcut would suffice for the time being. Lock Guides. Simple as that. I don’t see a real use case for locking guides individually, without having more basic options like, for instance, assigning guides to layers or, even more basic, changing the colour of guides. Hmm. 

[R C-R]

20 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

I don’t see a real use case for locking guides individually, without having more basic options like, for instance, assigning guides to layers or, even more basic, changing the colour of guides. Hmm. 

I strongly suspect that whatever capabilities are added to the guides, some users will complain that one or more 'basic' capability is missing ... & others will complain that there are too many of them, & that unnecessarily complicates using whatever they consider to be the most often used ones.

Personally, I just hope that the apps never get weighted down with so many tool options, menu choices, & preferences that performance suffers or that it takes hundreds of hours of study & experimentation to learn how everything works.

[xman]

Not sure I want it locked be default, since I use guides as part of building process sometime when doing say logos for example. I would like a shortcut and a lock ui maybe in the guide manager.

Edited November 26, 2018 by xman
Updates after split for context

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, xman said:

I would like a shortcut and a lock ui maybe in the guide manager.

That seems to me like a good place for it.

[walt.farrell]

22 minutes ago, xman said:

I would like a shortcut and a lock ui maybe in the guide manager.

I think that having a button on the Toolbar (as we had for awhile) would be better than having it buried in the Guide Manager. I use a lot of guides, but seldom use the Guide Manager. And having to open the Guide Manager just to lock or (later) to unlock a guide so I can move it is extra work.

But I could probably accept having it in both places.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I think that having a button on the Toolbar (as we had for awhile) would be better than having it buried in the Guide Manager.

If I understood the comment correctly, at least one user has already said they do not want to be forced to move the pointer off the canvas to the rulers, so I am guessing that would apply to a Toolbar button as well. There is also a potential issue with narrower windows that already force some of the buttons off the Toolbar, requiring a click to expose the remaining buttons. 

Basically, I think there is no single way to implement this that everybody will like -- there are too many different ways people want to use guides for that. Maybe the 'both places' idea would work, but that is yet another complication to what some think has already become an overly complicated UI.

[Old Bruce]

6 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

Easy enough to implement, just needs placing carefully in the UI. 

I misread this as "...needs placing carefully in the UK.

Man that Brexit thing is harsh.

[Aaron Martin]

I would assume since guides are mostly useful for snapping shapes to it, in my opinion we could have a tickable option in snapping tab which says “snap to guides” and under it have a sub option where it says lock giudes in canvas/artboard which when its ticked, you can only move guides on ruler or outside of canvas. 

[lepr]

.

[Move Along People]

-

[paolo.limoncelli]

I se

On 11/25/2018 at 2:04 PM, haakoo said:

Maybe like they do in Xara;

There is a separate guides-layer in the layers panel with off/on and lock switch.
You can even draw or drag lines/objects onto this layer to create irregular or diagonal guides.

I second that...

Maybe the quickest way to present it (at least the one in my mind) is generating an abstract "layer", so you can hide/show/lock/nest it just as we do with Adjustments. Also you could add multiple ones per artboard or canvas, depending on the layer you want to use. 

It could be very interesting to extend the concept to grids too... 

 

 

[xman]

I'm not against having it as a layer as long as it has a shortcut as well. Since it may be extra work to scroll to the guides layer if you have say over a thousand layer in a complex project.

For those of us not familiar will how xara does it maybe explain how it handles this in large projects.

For example:

Freehand did this. You had a guide layer, which you could move it up or down or lock it with the the layer lock icon. Or you could use the a command key (which is customizable).

 

[Grotesker]

As a layer fine, but there's a guides manager so obviously there. Sooner rather than later please!

[lepr]

.