Suggestion: Add Guide shortcut

Please add a shortcut for Add Guide. I’m currently working on a big project and using lots of guides and it’s occurred to me that right clicking and moving to Add Guide in the menu takes lots of time and all those seconds add up. ctrl+g would work, it doesn’t see to do anything now.

You can use the measurement tool (cmd+opt+ctrl), drag a line and press ‘g’ (while holding the other three buttons). That needs a bit finger acrobatic.

When triggered by a shortcut, where should be guide be placed?

Place the guide the same way it does when using Add Guide in the right-click menu. I just want a shortcut that does the same thing but in less time.

You can write a script and trigger it with a shortcut.

But the “Add Guide” from the context menu has a mouse click where it will place the guide (if there is no selection).

How about pasting guides a bunch of times? Placing a guide at a mouse cursor doesn’t sound like a precise method anyway and I imagine it involves dragging the guide to a desired position afterwards (or typing the position value). If that’s the case, the number of clicks necessary seems the same as pasting & dragging.

And what do you need all those guides for?

I know what you about the seconds adding up. You can try out Custom Guideline, it can quickly add guidelines on all selected nodes selected at whatever angle. If you have a specific angle/slope in mind, you can make that a preset.

If you’re using guides to replace vertical metrics, don’t. Better to use the Metrics in Font Info.

Other than the suggestions given in this thread already, you can opt-drag a guide to duplicate it.

Just put the guide wherever the pointer is. Or attached to a path if the path is selected just like with the right click version of Add Guide.

I use guides to measure stroke widths while moving paths around. They’re great for diagonal strokes, for example, in the image below I’m cleaning up oblique shapes in a sans serif.

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Are you aware of the Stem Thickness plugin? I also make a ton of obliques and always use Stem Thickness to check diagonal stems.

  • Stem Thickness as Sebastian said. Can be toggled with Ctrl-S
  • if you really need a guide quickly in measurement mode, use the ‘Toshi nerve pinch’: press G while you’re holding down Ctrl-Opt-Cmd and dragging the mouse.

Glad you still remember who requested the feature :slight_smile:

In the case of this screenshot, I would alternatively select the two nodes of the stroke, generate a guide, and double-click the guide origin to get the perpendicular angle.