I’ve given the latest betas a run for the past couple of months, and although I appreciate the new Tidy Foresight, the act of ‘Tidy’ has become unusable for me.
Tidy now also works on both the horizontal and vertical axis, making it even easier to align layers.
Tidy no longer respects just the horizontal or just the vertical spacing, and attempts to overly align both at the same time, which is desirable about 0% of the time. I have resorted to manually entering values in either the horizontal or vertical input fields and hitting return/tab. To speed up that process, I went back to using a plugin called Distributor v1.2.3 (PEZ/SketchDistributor on GitHub) so that I can use a hotkey to invoke precise horizontal or vertical spacing. Now, in my workflow at least, all of the recent Tidy updates are going unused. I still use Smart Layouts as much as possible, so getting the initial ‘tidied’ positions started is important.
Some options for improving this new feature:
- Revert the Tidy behavior of distributing only the horizontal or vertical spacing, using a best guess.
- Revert the Tidy behavior of distributing only the horizontal or vertical spacing, using a best guess, but introduce a modifier key to the Tidy button to make it work on both axes.
- Provide users with a setting to always Tidy both axes, or use the best guess.
Bonus:
- Allow users to enter numerical values in either horizontal or vertical spacing fields before needing to hit the Tidy button. Right now you can only enter values in a field if it is not blank.
- Add default hotkeys to target just the horizontal or vertical input fields. Similar in ways to using the SketchDistributor plugin above.
- Add default hotkey to invoke the Tidy command. Right now you must add a custom one via System Settings.
- Add the ability to numerically Tidy as part of the Smart Layout creation. e.g. Select items > cmd-L > type 40 > right arrow.
Thanks for the recent 99.5 beta work, the extra polish is appreciated.