Snapping
The magnet: what snaps to what, how close you have to be, the red alignment guides, and which tools obey it.
Snapping pulls whatever you are dragging onto a nearby grid line, point, edge or object, so shapes meet exactly instead of nearly. It is one master switch plus four sources, and it is off until you turn it on.
Turning it on
The magnet button on the main toolbar is the master switch. It starts off, and your choice is remembered between sessions. The small arrow next to it opens the snapping panel: Enable Snapping and Tolerance at the top, then the four sources, with Select All below them to switch on every source at once.
| Option | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Enable Snapping | Off | The same master switch as the magnet button: with it off, nothing below applies |
| Tolerance | 8 px | How close, in screen pixels, something has to be before it snaps. From 1 to 50 |
| Grid | On | The nearest grid intersection, at the current Grid Spacing |
| Vertex | On | Any point of any visible Shape layer |
| Line | Off | The closest position along any visible path segment |
| Object Bounds | Off | The corners, centre and edges of other objects' bounding boxes |
Switching on any source in the panel also switches the master on, so ticking a box always gives you working snapping. Switching a source off never touches the master.
How close is close enough
Tolerance is measured on screen, not in the document. Zooming in therefore makes snapping more precise rather than more eager: at 800% the same 8 pixels cover an eighth of the document distance they cover at 100%.
All sources are searched at once and the nearest candidate wins, so a point a pixel closer than a grid line beats the grid line.
Alignment guides
Every snap shows itself. A red line runs across the canvas along the edge or point that matched, and a small badge gives the distance in pixels. You see it when you move a node, a bone end or a shape, when you draw a shape, and when you place points with the Pen tool.
Objects do not have to be close to line up. As long as one edge matches, a horizontal or vertical guide spans the whole canvas to show it and the shape lands exactly on it, the way Affinity's alignment guides work. Every edge of the shape you move is considered, not only the one you grabbed it by: drag a shape by its top edge and its bottom, left and right edges still each get their chance to line up.
Moving several shapes at once aligns the box around the whole selection. A rotated shape aligns by its real, rotated corners.
Which tools snap
Snapping applies where you are positioning something:
- Move: while you drag layers around
- Transform: while you drag the body of the selection, but not while you scale, rotate or move the anchor
- Pen: both when you place a point and when you drag its handles
- Node: see below, it has its own rules
- The shape tools: the start and the end of the drag, and moving a shape you have just drawn
- Line: the start and the end of a segment, and dragging an end of the line
Everything else ignores the magnet entirely: Pencil, Brush, Eraser, Smudge, Knife, Fill, Marquee, Magic Wand, Eyedropper and Gradient never snap. Painting tools are meant to follow your hand. The value handles on a shape, such as a corner radius, a ring thickness or an edge bulge, never snap either: they follow the cursor exactly.
Node snapping and Weld
The Node tool does not use the shared tolerance. While you drag a vertex it snaps within 14 screen pixels to any vertex or edge of any visible Shape layer, ignoring the vertex you are dragging and the two edges attached to it. A snapped vertex lands exactly on its target rather than keeping the offset you grabbed it by.
Turning on Weld in the Node options forces this snapping on even when the magnet is off, and narrows the targets to vertices only. Edges stop attracting. Weld decides what happens on release: with it on, dropping a snapped vertex onto another vertex merges the two structurally.
Bone snapping
The Bone tool has its own magnet, again separate from the toolbar one. Its Snap checkbox, which is only offered in Edit mode, pulls the ends of a bone onto the start or end of any other bone within 15 screen pixels. While you are drawing a new bone you can also get the same snap on demand by holding Ctrl. Where a snap has already locked, it wins over the Shift angle constraint.
Working without it
Snapping is a positioning aid, not a constraint system: it never rewrites geometry you are not dragging, and it leaves no trace in the file. If a shape refuses to land where you want, switch the magnet off for that one move rather than fighting it. The button is one click away and the setting survives a restart.