Create rectangle from upper-left corner

Is it possible to create a rectangle with the upper left corner as the origin, rather than the center?This is me every time I need to make a rectangle :rofl: In this case all I wanted to do was create a rect whose upper corners snapped to the left/right edges of the circle.

I’m usually able to find a circuitous route to get what I need, but it’s an unintuitive and slow process for me, coming from a graphic design background. I’d expect that rects with a center origin would be the exception case, and would be triggered with a modifier key. I see this request has come up in the past. Was it ever implemented? This would be such a huge QOL boost!

Similarly, I wish the Scale tool had the ability to choose your anchor point. E.g., say I want to bump the right side out by 1 inch, I might select my object, open the scale tool, and add 1" to the width (see below). However, instead of pushing out the right side by 1", CC extends both the left and right side by .5", as it’s assuming I wanted to do this relative to the center.

Something like paint.net’s canvas resize tool is a great example of what I’m looking for! I would just select an anchor on the left before entering my new amount.

Hold down the control key.

See:

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Wow, thank you Will! That’s gonna be such an improvement to my experience!

I was confused when I read your post as I swore I had tried the modifiers. Turns out, the preview object will still be center-based when you hold ctrl until you move the mouse. So quickly cycling through the modifier keys mid-object never exposed me to the feature. Would be a nice small change to make for discoverability: the preview object updates to corner-drawn as soon as you press Ctrl.

Any idea if my second question is possible: scaling from somewhere other than the center? I find myself using that text entry screen a lot when I want to push out one edge by a set amount.

Don’t thank me, thank the developers.

The second idea is a feature request — we’ll have to see what the developers think.

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