When you drag an element around the canvas, livediagram quietly helps you line it up. As an edge or centre comes close to a neighbour's, the element snaps into alignment and a faint guide line appears to show the match — so a tidy layout falls into place without nudging pixels by hand.
What snapping lines up
While you drag, the element snaps to nearby elements':
- Edges — left, right, top, or bottom edges line up flush.
- Centres — horizontal and vertical centres align, so things sit centred on one another.
- Even spacing — when an element sits between or beyond two others it snaps to an equal gap, and a short guide marks the matched spacing.
A guide line only appears once a match is actually in effect, so the canvas stays clean until alignment is doing something. The same guides show when you drag an arrow endpoint, latching it onto a shape's edge or straightening a near-horizontal or near-vertical arrow.
Dragging freely — hold Cmd or Ctrl
Sometimes you want a deliberately off-grid position and snapping gets in the way. Hold Cmd (⌘) on a Mac, or Ctrl on Windows / Linux, while you drag to switch snapping off for that move: no snap, no guide lines — the element follows your pointer exactly. Let go and the next drag snaps as usual, so it's a per-drag override, not a mode you have to remember to turn back on.
The modifier works the same for a single element, a multi-selection, and an arrow's endpoint — anything you drag follows the pointer freely while the key is held.
Reach for ⌘/Ctrl-drag for the last fine adjustment: let snapping line most of a diagram up for you, then hold the key for the one element you want sitting slightly off the grid.
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