Move takes hold of whole shapes. Click one to select it, drag to slide it over the sheet, pull a handle to make it larger or smaller, and reach just past a corner to turn it. The hole a cut makes and the piece it folds out follow every change, because both are worked out again from the shape you drew.
What it does
Press V, or choose ‘Move’ on the rail. Click a shape to select it. Click its flipped piece, out beyond the sheet, and you select the same cut, because the piece belongs to it. Where shapes overlap, a click takes the one on top. Shift-click adds a shape to the selection or takes it out again. A click on empty canvas, or Escape, lets everything go, and so does changing to another tool.
Drag from empty canvas and a dashed rectangle, the marquee, stretches from the press to the pointer. Let go and everything it touches is selected: a shape, or its piece, only has to overlap the rectangle, not sit wholly inside it. Hold Shift as you let go to add to what was already selected.
A selection sits in a box with eight handles. From there:
- Drag inside the box to move. Whatever you take hold of follows the pointer: grab the shape on the sheet and it moves with you while its piece moves the other way across the fold, as a mirror image must; grab the flipped piece, anywhere on its side of the sheet’s edge, and the piece moves with you while the hole moves the other way. Hold Shift to keep the move horizontal, vertical or on a 45° diagonal, measured from where the drag began.
- Option-drag (Alt) to pull away a copy and leave the original in place. The copy is made at the first movement, so an Option-click that never moves leaves no hidden duplicate behind.
- Drag a handle to scale. The handle opposite holds still and the one you hold stays under the pointer. Corner handles scale both ways, side handles one way. On a corner handle, Shift keeps the proportions. Option holds the center still instead, so both sides move at once.
- Turn the selection by moving the pointer just outside a corner handle. There is no knob to find: the cursor becomes a curved arrow when you are in the zone, a narrow ring beyond each corner. Drag around and the shapes turn about their center. Shift turns in steps of 15°.
- Click an arrow beside one side of the box to fold the piece out over that edge of the sheet instead. The piece does not jump. It folds back into its hole first, then out over the new edge, the only way a real piece of paper could get there.
- Put back, the small button in the middle of the box, returns the selection’s paper to the sheet: a cut’s piece flies home into its hole, and a piece cut from another piece goes back onto the sheet over the edge its paper came from. It is not shown for paper already put back, or when the box is too small to leave room around it to take hold of the shape.
The keyboard works on the selection while Move is in hand. The arrow keys nudge it one unit, a ninety-sixth of an inch or about a quarter of a millimeter; Shift makes that ten units, Command a tenth of one. Holding an arrow down is one step in the history however far it travels, while each separate tap is its own. Command-A selects everything. Command-C and Command-V copy and paste, each paste landing a little further down and to the right, on top. Command-D repeats the last move, turn or scale, and Delete removes the selection.
Move also brings ‘Align’ and ‘Transform’ to the ‘Controls’ tab, for the same jobs done by exact amounts: see Align and Transform.
Why it works this way
The gestures are Illustrator’s, because many hands already know them. Each one also earns its place in a notan.
Scaling from the opposite handle matters because a notan’s cuts so often touch the edge of the sheet. Pull the left handle of a cut that sits against the right edge and its right side stays exactly on the edge. If the box scaled about its center, as this app once did, the right side would drift inwards and leave a sliver of paper where the cut no longer reaches.
The box you see wraps a shape and its flipped piece, but the arithmetic of a move, scale or turn is measured on the drawn shapes alone. Only the drawn shape is real; the hole and the piece are worked out from it by cutting and folding. Turning about the middle of the whole box would swing a shape around a point out in its own reflection.
During a drag, every frame goes back to the shapes as they were when the drag began and applies the whole change again, rather than adding a small step to the last frame. Tiny rounding errors would otherwise pile up, and a shape turned around and back again would not quite come home.
Fifteen degrees is not arbitrary either. A draftsman’s two set squares give 45°, 30°, 60° and 90°, and laid against each other they give 15° and 75°. A 15° step reaches every one of those angles.
The metaphor
This is a paper shape on a table under your hand. You slide it with a fingertip, turn it by a corner, lay a second one beside it.
The metaphor holds for moving and turning. It breaks in three places, all of them useful. Paper cannot grow or shrink, and here it does, in either direction or both. Paper cannot be copied by dragging it with a key held down. And paper cannot heal: once a knife has been through it, the hole stays where it was cut. Here a cut is a proposal until you are done with it. Move a cut and the hole goes with it, the sheet closing up behind as if it had never been opened.
One physical limit is kept: a handle cannot be dragged through the shape to mirror it. For a reflection, use Transform.
A history
In art
Moving pieces around until they sit right is as old as collage. In September 1912 Georges Braque, staying at Sorgues in the south of France, bought a roll of wallpaper printed to imitate oak paneling from a shop in Avignon and pasted strips of it into a charcoal still life, Fruit Dish and Glass. He counted it his first papier collé, and the pasted-paper picture became a turning point of Cubism.
The closest ancestor of this tool, though, is Henri Matisse in his last years. Too ill to work at an easel for long, he had his assistant Lydia Delectorskaya paint sheets of paper with gouache in the colors he chose, cut shapes from them with large scissors, and pinned them up where he could see them. Small works he pinned to a board and adjusted himself. For the large ones, his assistants moved the pieces around the studio walls at his direction until the arrangement was right. His book Jazz, begun in 1943 and published in 1947, was the first sustained project made this way. A pin is a move tool: nothing is final until it is glued.
In printing
From the 1960s until desktop publishing took over in the 1990s, a great many printed pages were assembled by hand in paste-up. Type came out of the phototypesetter as strips of photographic paper. The paste-up artist cut them apart, coated their backs with wax or rubber cement, and laid them on a stiff board ruled with guide lines in a blue the camera could not see. Wax let a column be lifted and put down again somewhere better, which is exactly what Move is for. The finished board was photographed to make the printing plate.
Scaling had its own instruments. A photograph to be enlarged or reduced for the page was worked out on a proportion wheel, a circular slide rule of two discs that gave the percentage to set on the process camera. Older still is the pantograph, a linked parallelogram of rods that redraws a drawing larger or smaller as a pointer is traced over the original. The Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner used one to copy and scale diagrams in 1603.
In technology
The first program in which you could take hold of a drawing on a screen and move it was Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, written for his doctoral thesis at MIT and presented in 1963. Working at the TX-2 computer with a light pen, a user could copy figures, move them, rotate them and resize them, and the figures kept their structure as they changed.
The marquee came with MacPaint, Bill Atkinson’s painting program for the first Macintosh in 1984. Atkinson needed a way to show a rectangular selection and drew its border as a moving dashed line; the idea came to him, the story goes, from an animated Hamm’s beer sign in a pub in Los Gatos. Rod Perkins, on Apple’s Lisa team, said it looked like marching ants, and the name stuck. The selection itself was called the marquee, after the chasing lights around a theatre sign.
The rest of Move’s grammar, Shift to constrain, Option to copy, Command-D to do it again, is Illustrator’s. One difference is deliberate. In Illustrator, repeating after an Option-drag repeats the copy as well; here Command-D repeats only the move.
In professional software
Nearly every drawing and layout program has this tool, usually a black arrow at the top of the toolbar, on V. What transfers is the bounding box: a box of handles in which the place you press decides whether a drag moves, scales or turns.
- Adobe Illustrator. The Selection tool (
V) works much as Move does here: drag inside to move, drag a handle to scale from the opposite side, hover just outside a corner to rotate, and Option-drag (Alt-drag) to copy. ‘Object › Transform › Transform Again’, ⌘D (Ctrl+D), repeats the last transformation, so an Option-drag followed by ⌘D a few times gives a row of evenly spaced copies. - Adobe Photoshop. The Move tool (
V) slides whole layers, and scaling or turning is a separate step: ‘Edit › Free Transform’, ⌘T (Ctrl+T), puts a box of handles around the layer, and Shift switches between proportional and free scaling. Scaling pixels resamples them; a Smart Object keeps the original, so scale that instead. - Autodesk AutoCAD.
MOVE,ROTATEandSCALEask you to select objects, then pick a base point, which forROTATEandSCALEis the one point that stays put, then give a second point, an angle or a factor, typed exactly if you like. With no command running, click an object’s grip and press Space to cycle through stretch, move, rotate, scale and mirror. - Figma. The Move tool (
V) has the same box, the same curved arrow just beyond a corner for rotating, and Option-drag to duplicate. - Cricut Design Space. A selected image sits in a bounding box: drag it to move, pull the handle at the bottom right to resize, and turn it with the round handle at the top right. Before cutting, select the sheet and its cuts and choose ‘Attach’ in the ‘Layers’ panel, or the software rearranges the pieces on the mat to save material and your layout is lost.
What carries over. Scale from the opposite handle, Shift to constrain, Option to copy, a keystroke to repeat: these work almost everywhere. The difference to watch is the fixed point. Studio Notan and Illustrator take it from the handle you hold; AutoCAD asks you for it, so snap the base point to a corner or an endpoint rather than clicking near one.
Try this
- Draw a cut against the right edge of the sheet, choose Move, and drag its left handle outwards. The right side stays on the edge. Then try the same drag with Option held.
- Turn a shape with Shift held and feel the 15° steps. Then press Command-D and watch it turn again by the same amount.
- Select a cut and click the arrow on another side of its box. Watch the piece fold home before it folds out again.