TAD Docs

The mouse can be used rather cleverly in TAD; in multiple ways. Your work can greatly be sped up when you learn all these mouse tricks.

The mouse cursor also has lot of interesting cues for you to understand what you can do.

The usual left arrow pointing mouse cursor is for selecting objects. When you click on Zoom Down or Zoom Up or Pan, the mouse cursor changes to reflect each functionality. In such situations you cannot select objects – but instead if you draw rectangles on the screen; the zoom or pan would get done.

However, there are some common activities that can be done irrespective of the mouse cursor. These are as follows

1. If you move the cursor on top of the architect it will change the shape – in that changed stage you can drag the architect to any other location using the mouse left button pressed down.
2. If you right click on any object edge, that object would now become the current object and the helpers would be shifted to that edge.
3. If you press the ALT key and then drag a rectangle on the screen, the stepsize of the architect would change.
4. If you press the shift key and right mouse button together, it would attempt to find if there was a vertex of another object nearby (within the architect's stepsize). If so, then the current object's first vertex (where the first helper is located) would be shifted to that found vertex.

You can do even more magic with the mouse!

Shift side or corner using mouse
Press the SHIFT+ALT key and drag the 1st helper then you can stretch that current edge. But if you press only the SHIFT key when dragging the 1st helper, you can shift that corner.

Extrude side or add corner using mouse
Click CTRL while dragging the 1st helper will add a corner between 1st and 2nd helper. But if you press CTRL+ALT when you drag it, then it will extrude the current edge

Non-modal zoom-up/zoom-dn/pan
As zoom up/down pan are all quite commonly used, they can all be invoked via the mouse practically in any situation; irrespective of the current mode the mouse is set to:

For changing architect step size press Alt when dragging mouse
For Zoomup, press Shift when dragging mouse to create a rectangle. The site will shrink down into that rectangle
For Zoom dn, press Ctrl when dragging mouse to create a rectangle. That portion of the site will get magnified
For Pan, press [Ctrl+Shift] when dragging mouse to create a rectangle. The centre of that rectangle will become the next centre of the site

Once the zoom/pan action gets done, the mouse behaviour returns back to what it was doing earlier. This is super convenient when you are working fast!