Smarter Duplicate and Move

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Often times, one needs to create many copies of an element that are spaced out evenly. Sketch already lets you do this: if you ⌥+drag an element, and then press ⌘+D, you can make as many evenly-spaced duplicates as you like. Recently, Figma has taken this idea further:

In Figma, object duplication is “less strict” about edits. You can create a copy of an element, adjust it, and then press ⌘+D — those position edits influence the spacing of the duplicates.

Today’s more limited version in Sketch:

Figma’s “smarter” implementation (yes it caused me physical pain to open Figma):

This is a great time saver that would be fantastic to see in a future Sketch update!

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Hey Kyle,

Thanks for sharing this and just in case, you can get rotated shapes automatically with Rotate copies.

It’s different from what Figma does, but it can do the job nicely if you want to create rotated copies. I hope this helps :smiley:

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This is a great feature too (and more useful than what Figma does in some ways, as it lets you adjust spacing and center point). But the real benefit from Figma’s version of Duplicate and Move is that it works without having to Option Drag, and that you can adjust spacing at any time, not just on the initial duplication.

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Oh yeah, what they added has nice extras. I just wanted to share this Duplicate copies in case you had missed it, it works quite nice. :+1:

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Hey @dfmedrano If you guys look into this feature more in future, some good reference is power duplicate in Affinity apps (Which I think is where they got the idea from) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yisjJgbkgYU

It’s just “Repeat last action” on a duplicate basically - extremely useful in Affinity, but not a silver bullet. It doesn’t replace dedicated tools like duplicate copies, so shouldn’t be looked at as replacement functionality, just in addition. I’d love to see this in Sketch.

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