Tool stickiness toggle?

[karim]

In general, I find the tool palette behavior to be pretty good, but one exception is the shape tools... in my use so far, more often than not, when I draw a shape, the very next thing I want to do is manipulate it in some way, but the default behavior is for the shape tool to stay "sticky" until I select another tool.

 

I recognize that a lot of people probably like the existing behavior, so it would be nice to have a preferences option to turn sticky tools on or off. OmniGraffle does a nice job of this, where the default is "sticky" but you can turn on "non-sticky" if you like. In this mode, each tool will perform it's action once, and then revert back to the Arrow (Selection) tool.

 

You can make any tool temporarily sticky by double-clicking it, in which case it will stay on that tool until you select another one.

 

OmniGraffle also has a really nice related feature which is "momentary keyboard shortcuts" which you can turn on, in which pressing the shortcut for a given tool switches to that tool only as long as the key is pressed. For example, if I'm using the Draw Shape tool, I can hold down W (format brush), Opt-Click an element to copy formatting, Click another to copy formatting, and then release W and I'm back to the Draw Shape tool.

[joost]

Funny, I really never liked that stickiness feature in OG. Mentally, I feel I grab a tool (which ever one it is) and hold that until I grab another one. In OG's model you have to grab the same tool again and again or decide up front that "now" you are going to use it for a while and turn on sticky mode. So you are constantly planning your steps.  Perhaps I am not structured enough but I can't get my head to think that way.