Drag a door, guides snap it into line

Drag an opening across the wall and it snaps to line up with the others — edges, centrelines, sills and heads — with framing clearances applied last so a snap can never produce an illegal placement.

What it is

A Figma-style drag pipeline: automatic alignment snapping with no modifier, SHIFT to lock the motion axis, ALT to duplicate. Horizontal candidates are the dragged opening's left edge, centreline and right edge against every other opening on the same wall; vertical candidates are sills and heads against openings on ANY wall, because a window band usually runs at one height around the whole building.

Also called: move a door · smart guides · alignment · alt duplicate · shift axis lock

See it
Drag a door, guides snap it into line
New lead 4
Marlin Hoover
$44k
Delia Yoder
$38k
Contacted 2
Sutter Kline
$50k
Ronan Petsch
$32k
Estimate 2
Ivy Brubaker
$32k
Gideon Alt
$70k
Sold 3
Marlin Hoover
$74k
Delia Yoder
$20k
Sutter Kline
$69k
Two windows on a sidewall with a horizontal accent guide running the full wall at the shared head height, and the dragged window's chip showing its offset. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1Order of application is fixed: axis lock first, then snap resolution on the allowed axis, then framing-rule clamps LAST.
  2. 2A clamp that breaks an alignment drops its guide, so the line you see is always a line you got.
  3. 3An alignment-snapped axis skips the 3in grid, because a window head on a 6ft-8in door head is off-grid and requantizing would break the alignment that just locked.
  4. 4SHIFT axis lock uses the dominant TOTAL delta from drag start, re-evaluated each move, so pulling harder the other way switches axis mid-drag; it also pins the drag to its starting wall.
  5. 5A single drag resolves ABSOLUTELY against the current spec, so fast pointermoves cannot stack.
  6. 6Cross-wall dragging re-centres the opening on the new wall for single-opening drags.
Why we built it

Alt-dragging a window to duplicate it produced a copy that snapped instantly to one side of the original before the builder had moved anywhere, because a copy is born exactly on top of its source, which reads as an illegal overlap, and the usual answer to an overlap is to jump clear of it. A new copy now holds still until the pointer has carried it off the original. Dragging openings shows alignment guides against the other openings and the bay lines, so spacing a row of windows evenly is a drag rather than arithmetic.

The problem
  • Openings aligned by eye on a wall that is 60ft long.
  • Duplicates lurching a full width on the first pointer move.
  • Snap positions that violate framing clearances.
Sound familiar?
What you get
Alignment is automatic and visible as a guide.
Clearances are always honoured, snapping never overrides them.
ALT-duplicate then place is a single undo step.

See it on your own jobs

Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.

or keep browsing features →