Copy, paste and duplicate

What you will learn

How to copy objects to the clipboard and paste them where you click, paste them at their own coordinates, duplicate them with the pointer, cut them, and carry them into another drawing. Everything here is also in the toolbar's Edit group: Copy, Paste and the More menu.

Copy and paste where you click

1. Select the objects: click them, or drag a window.
2. Press ⌘CCtrl+C, or click Copy in the Edit group. The command line says how many objects were copied. They stay selected.
3. Press ⌘VCtrl+V, or click Paste. The copy appears on the cursor, hanging from the lower-left corner of the copied objects.
4. Click where that corner goes, or type a point such as 2000,500 and press ReturnEnter. Object snaps and Ortho work as usual.

The pasted objects are selected, so you can move or change them straight away. One ⌘ZCtrl+Z takes the whole paste away.

Paste in place

Press ⇧⌘VCtrl+Shift+V, or choose Paste in place in the More menu. The copy goes in at exactly the coordinates it was copied from, with no click. Use it to carry objects into another drawing at the same place, or from a sheet into another sheet.

Duplicate and move

1. Select the objects.
2. Press ⌘DCtrl+D, or choose Duplicate and move in the More menu.
3. A copy sits on top of the original and moves with the pointer. Click where it goes. You can also type a displacement such as @0,-600, or a distance toward the cursor.

EscEsc before the click leaves nothing behind. The duplicate is one undo step and does not touch the clipboard.

Cut

Press ⌘XCtrl+X, or choose Cut in the More menu. The objects go on the clipboard and are erased from the drawing, in one undo step. Paste them back with ⌘VCtrl+V or ⇧⌘VCtrl+Shift+V.

Between drawings and tabs

The clipboard keeps its copy when you open another drawing, and it is shared by every CadCraft tab in this browser. Copy in one tab, then press ⌘VCtrl+V in another.

• Blocks the objects use come with them. If the drawing you paste into already has a block of the same name, its own definition is used, as AutoCAD does.
• Layers the objects use are added, with the color and settings they had.
• The copy is not rescaled when the two drawings use different units: CadCraft says so, and you can use SCALE afterwards.
• Viewports stay on their sheet; they are left out of a copy.

Common mistakes

• ⌘VCtrl+V pasted text into the command line. You had typed something there, so the keys worked on the text. Press EscEsc to clear it, then press ⌘VCtrl+V again.
• Nothing happened, and the status bar says to finish the current command. Another command is running. Press EscEsc first.
• The paste landed far away. It hangs from the lower-left corner of what you copied, which may be a distant object you selected by accident. Use Paste in place, or copy with COPYBASE.
• "Nothing pasted" with a reason. What another tab left on the clipboard could not be read (it was damaged, or changed by hand). Copy the objects again.

See the full list of keys in Keyboard and mouse, and every prompt in the Command reference.