There are occasions when you want to move part of a drawing that has not been grouped but without it affecting other connected geometry. So what do you do? What I often do is use Move/Copy and then delete the old instance. But that is often a bit of a faff.
What about having an option to Move/Delete? Either by using a control key or by right clicking after the move, you can choose to delete the original of what you have moved. It would have to be clever enough to realize that you rarely want to delete the lines that connected the original geometry to the moved part so that you don’t end up deleting far too much of the original. Not beyond the wit of man (or developer), I would think.
The best I can think of is Cut and Paste. Paste uses the leftmost lowest location of your selection within the systems axes. You could group your selection (and later explode it after having positioned it with ‘Paste’).
Actually, that does work, albeit with the limitation of pick point. So thanks for that. Now if you could only combine it with the cursor keys to make the direction of move easier…
This ties in with another longstanding bugbear of mine that SU has no direct Copy command, only a sub-species of the Move command. But let’s not go there again (oops, I just did!).
I think there are ways to do what you want. My examples answer your original question in a different way. Instead of cut and paste, I would make what you have selected be a group, then move it, then explode it (if still being a group is a bad thing). Given that approach, here are two cases you might use that:
You have something in the corner of a room, that may well be touching the geometry of the walls. It was supposed to be in the middle of the 10 foot square room. There is nothing in the middle of the room to get inference from. You could do this:
a. Carefully select the part to move.
b. Group.
c. Move tool, move the object in any direction, any amount.
d. Type [5’,5’,0] Enter.
It’s now in the middle of the room.
That object its supposed to appear five times across the green axis wall.
a. Select and group as before.
b. Move tool, tap the copy modifier key.
c. Move the object any amount along the green axis. Type 10’ Enter.
d. Type /4 Enter (some prefer 4/ Enter).
You now have five of the object evenly spaced along the wall.
Yes, there are several workarounds. I use one that I described, @dezmo outlined another, and you have proposed a third.
I guess what I was getting at was not so much how to do it as to how it might be done much more simply than the various workarounds. Obviously, if no one ever has to do this much, it isn’t worth having a simpler way but I suspect it is quite common.
I’ve made the point before that one of the great beauties of SU is its intuitiveness. So anything that helps make it more so must surely be a good thing, right?
I group everything that is a distinct object. If I want to move anything without dragging what it is attached to, I consider it a separate object and group it first.
I don’t think a special option like Delete-original Copy Move since the result can already be achieved using existing logic and functionality.
sorry