Snapping & alignment guides

How it works

While you move or resize, alignment guides appear the moment an edge or center of your element lines up with an edge or center of another element on screen — the familiar behavior from professional design tools, in visualOS’s signature red. The element snaps precisely onto the guide, so “almost aligned” becomes “aligned”.

• Works with left/right/top/bottom edges and horizontal/vertical centers.
• Works while resizing too — match an image’s width to its neighbor by dragging its corner until the guide appears.
• Snap distance is a few screen pixels, so it helps without grabbing.

Opting out

Hold Cmd/Ctrl while dragging to disable snapping temporarily — for those organic, deliberately-messy arrangements.

Snapping to the grid

Hold Cmd/Ctrl+Shift while moving or resizing to snap to the background dots instead of to the neighbouring elements. Moving locks the selection’s top-left corner onto a dot; resizing locks the edge you are dragging.

• It is never on by default — the dots only take over for as long as you hold both keys.
• No “nearly” about it: past the first few pixels of the drag, every position lands on a dot. Let go of the keys and the drag is free again.
• While held, Shift’s usual “keep aspect ratio” stands down, so both edges can reach their dots.
• The dots appear for the duration of the drag even if you have the grid switched off in the settings.
• A rotated element has no straight edge to land on a row of dots, so it simply resizes freely — just as it does with Cmd/Ctrl alone.
• Desktop only: the browser and the Mac app. On iPad and iPhone the gesture does not exist — Cmd/Ctrl+Shift keeps its usual meanings there, even with a keyboard attached.

Friends of alignment

• The background grid (Settings → Canvas settings) gives your eyes reference lines — and, with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift held, something to snap to (see above).
• Rotation snapping: rotating an element gently locks at 0°, 90°, 180°, 270° — see Group, lock & rotate.
• Shift with lines: drawing or adjusting a line with Shift held constrains it to 0°/45°/90°.

Arrange as a grid

Select two or more elements and press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+A — or click the grid icon in the floating bar. The selection is tidied in place into a grid: as many columns as the square root of the count (9 items → 3×3, 12 → 4 wide), a fixed 24 px gap, each row as tall as its tallest item with everything top-aligned. Sizes are never changed.

• Order: the rows you already had, left to right — so it tidies rather than shuffles.
• Anchor: the top-left corner of the selection stays where it was.
• Groups travel as one block; locked elements stay put.
• Works with every element type — notes, images, cards, shapes, drawings.
• Undo with Cmd/Ctrl+Z.

Dropping, pasting or uploading several files at once uses the same grid automatically, centred on the drop point and in file order — see Images.