Custom Toolbar

[Ace Manev]

Hello

It be nice a user can customize the toolbar with their most used tools in a separate panel that can be a floating toolbar or docked to main UI (side, upper or lower) - similar to inkscape it has the alignment & distribute tool that you can float it or dock it on the side. I am aware you can add to the upper tool bar, but once you start adding it gets cramped, busy and distracting. 

 

Thanks

[Frozen Death Knight]

@Ace Manev If you are talking about the toolbar on the left side, you can customize it fully by going to View -> Customize Tools... and you will be able to move around all your tools the way you want them to be. To make the left toolbar float, you can just double click in an empty space around the tools to detach it, and reattach it by double clicking on it again.

[fde101]

19 hours ago, Ace Manev said:

it has the alignment & distribute tool

 

7 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

If you are talking about the toolbar on the left side

 

The alignment and distribution options are on the main toolbar at the top of the window, so I presume that is the one he is referring to.  That one does not have those capabilities, at least not on the Mac.  Adding those features (alignment/distribution/etc.) to the set of icons that can be added to the tools (the one on the left, which can be floated) would be one possible way to handle this.  Adding a separate "Arrange, Align and Distribute" studio panel might be another.

[fde101]

@Ace Manev, welcome to the forum!

In addition to my comments above, I realized that I should probably point out the alignment handles too in case you might not be aware of them.

 

On the context toolbar when using the Move tool or the Node tool, enable the button that has a line down the middle with arrows pointing toward it from either side:

 

This causes a few additional handles to be displayed on the selected shape:

 

You can drag those handles with snapping enabled to snap them to the boundaries of other objects on the page (any snapping candidates) or to the page center/edges, etc.

For example, if you drag the left-pointing arrow along the left edge of the shape until it snaps to the right edge of an object, then releasing the mouse there will cause the left edge of the selected shape to be aligned to the right edge of that other object.

 

Depending on what you need from the alignment tools, this might help to reduce the need to have those extra buttons on the toolbar - they will work well for some use cases, not as well for others.  There is no reason you couldn't just leave them enabled.

 

Note that they need to be enabled separately for the move and node tools, and that with the node tool, they are only available when transform mode is enabled:

 

Transform mode places a bounding box around the selected nodes of the selected object so that you can manipulate those nodes in much the same manner as you would manipulate an entire shape when using the move tool.  You can then use the alignment handles to align the selected nodes to whatever (the selected nodes do need to have both height and width for the alignment handles to show up).