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and you see the Isolate item shown in Figure 10-7. A status bar icon — a light bulb at the lower-right corner of the display — is dimmed when objects are either hidden or isolated. Click this icon to open a menu that lets you turn off the hiding or isolating.

If you’re worried about the possible implications of this (“Hmm. . . I was sure I added those center lines . . . do I need to add them again?”), relax. Hiding and isolating objects is temporary — it only lasts as long as your current drawing session. If you end a drawing with objects isolated or hidden, they reappear when you reopen the file.

Rumor has it that the Autodesk programmers stole this cloaking and uncloaking concept from the Romulans.

Figure 10-7: Make those selected objects go away (but only temporarily!).

Get a Grip

Although command-first editing is the most flexible and widespread editing style in AutoCAD, it’s not the only way. Grip editing is a useful adjunct to command-first editing, especially when you want to modify just one or two objects. You may have encountered grip editing when using other kinds of graphics programs. But even if you’re an experienced user of other graphics programs, you’ve never seen grips used in quite the way that AutoCAD uses them.

Anything that you can do with grip editing can be done with command-first editing as well. In some situations, grip editing is a little more efficient or convenient than command-first editing, but command-first editing always gets the job done. If you master only one style of editing, make it command-first style. In other words, feel free to skip this section — at least until you’re comfortable with command-first editing.

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206 Part II: Let There Be Lines

About grips

Grips are those little square, rectangular, or triangular handles that appear on an object after you select it.

In their simplest guise, AutoCAD grips work similarly to the little squares on graphical objects in other Windows programs. But in AutoCAD, instead of clicking and dragging a grip, you must click, release the mouse button, move the crosshairs, and click again at the new location. (By separating the selection of beginning and ending points into two different operations, AutoCAD allows you to use different techniques — such as different object snaps — to select each point.)

AutoCAD grips are, for sophisticated users, better than the grips found in most other programs because you can do so much more with them. You can, for example, use AutoCAD grips to move, stretch, or copy an object. You also can use them to rotate an object, scale it to a different size, or mirror an object — that is, create one or more reversed copies. Grips also act as visible object snaps, or little magnets that attract the crosshairs.

Starting with AutoCAD 2012, grips on lines, arcs, and elliptical arcs have become multifunctional. Hovering over an endpoint grip displays a pop-up menu that offers you a choice of lengthening or stretching the object. Hovering over the midpoint grip on an arc offers the choice of stretching the arc by its midpoint (that is, keeping the same endpoints) or changing its radius. Elliptical arcs display triangular grips that let you increase the length of the arc without changing its other parameters. Hovering over a grip on the midpoint of a polyline segment offers the choice of stretching (that is, moving

the current segment while maintaining its connections to its siblings), adding a new vertex (that is, split the current segment into two), or turning a line segment into an arc or vice versa.

A gripping example

The following sections cover in detail the five grip editing modes: STRETCH, MOVE, ROTATE, SCALE, and MIRROR. Follow these steps to explore the grip editing modes:

1.Draw some simple geometry, such as the object shown in Figure 10-8.

Here’s a great place to practice some of the straight-line object creation tools we describe in Chapter 8!

2.Press Esc to make sure that no command is active and no objects are selected, and then click Quick Properties on the status bar to turn off the Quick Properties palette.

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Chapter 10: Get a Grip on Object Selection 207

The Quick Properties palette is pretty useful for editing the properties of objects, but more often than not, it gets in the way when you want to edit the objects themselves. Besides, properties should normally be set ByLayer rather than by object overrides. Property overrides are covered in Chapter 6.

AutoCAD displays a blank command prompt — that is, no command is currently active.

3.Click an object onscreen to select it and display its grips.

Grips — solid blue squares on the selected object — appear at various points on the object. Note that the AutoCAD command prompt remains blank; you haven’t started a command or grip editing operation yet.

4.Click another object.

Both the newly selected object and the previously selected object display grips.

5.Click one of the grips on either object.

If a pop-up menu appears when you get close to a grip, ignore it for now and go ahead and click the grip. The blue square turns to a red square. This grip is now hot, or selected and ready for a grip editing operation.

Grip editing options now appear on the command line. The first option to appear is STRETCH.

6.Press the spacebar repeatedly to cycle through the five grip editing options on the command line.

** STRETCH **

Specify stretch point or [Base point/Copy/Undo/eXit]: ** MOVE **

Specify move point or [Base point/Copy/Undo/eXit]: ** ROTATE **

Specify rotation angle or [Base point/Copy/Undo/Reference/eXit]: ** SCALE **

Specify scale factor or [Base point/Copy/Undo/Reference/eXit]: ** MIRROR **

Specify second point or [Base point/Copy/Undo/eXit]:

The grip editing option displayed on the command line and the Dynamic Input tooltip (if Dynamic Input is enabled) changes as you press the spacebar. If you move the crosshairs (without picking) in between each press of the spacebar, the appearance of your selected object changes as you display each option. Choosing STRETCH, for example, causes a stretched version of the object to appear onscreen.

Pressing the spacebar a bunch of times is a good way to become familiar with the grip editing modes, but there’s a more direct way to choose

a particular mode. After you click a grip to make it hot, right-click to display the grip editing menu. That menu contains all the grip editing options plus some other choices, as shown in Figure 10-8.

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208 Part II: Let There Be Lines

Figure 10-8: The grip editiwng right-click menu.

If Dynamic Input is enabled, pressing the down-arrow key while cycling through the grip editing options displays a dynamic menu at the crosshairs from which you can choose options specific to the current grip editing function.

7.Press the spacebar until STRETCH (or the option you want) reappears as the grip editing option.

8.Move the hot grip in the direction in which you want to stretch (or otherwise manipulate) your object.

AutoCAD dynamically updates the image of the object to show you what the modified object will look like before you click the final location.

9.Click again to finish the grip editing operation.

The selected object with the hot grip updates.

10.Click the same grip that you chose in Step 5 (now in a different location) to make it hot.

11.This time, move the crosshairs near one of the grips on the other object. When you see the magnetic pull of the grip on the other object, click again to connect the hot grip with the other grip.

The object point represented by the hot grip now coincides exactly with the grip on the other object.

12.Press Esc to deselect all objects and remove all grips.

Figure 10-9 shows a hot (red) endpoint grip of a line being connected to the endpoint grip of another line. The angled line shows the original position of the line being edited, and the thin vertical line shows the new position. Using

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