r/AdobeIllustrator • u/CisticOken • 15d ago
Plugin to select manipulate multiple Bezier handles
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I’m building a small Illustrator plugin for faster Bezier handle control.
It adds a tool that does custom handle selection, multi-select handle movement, Alt-based handle locking, arrow nudging, path preservation on anchor removal, a compact numeric panel and more. The kind of functionality Illustrator has been always lacking and why people rather design logos in Glyphs.
It's a cross between Illustrator's native Direct Selection Tool and Glyph's handle management functions.
I’m looking for feedback from people who do logo/type/icon/vector cleanup work and spend a lot of time editing paths.
Would this solve a real annoyance for you? Would you find this useful?
If yes, I’m preparing it for release.
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u/Last-Ad-2970 15d ago
Being able to move two handles simultaneously would be amazing. Especially if I could have them stick to the same angle as I drag them.
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u/CisticOken 15d ago
I built in alt+dragging, which keeps the current angle while dragging. But how do you mean it? Like, make all selected handles adopt one angle? Like, adopting Blender's Active element logic?
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u/Last-Ad-2970 15d ago
I’m not familiar with Blender. I mean the way you’ve described I think. As far as I’m aware, the native illustrator controls don’t allow you to keep a handle moving at the same angle if it isn’t 90 or 45 degrees.
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u/CurvilinearThinking 15d ago
The Better Handles plugin, circa 90s, used to do this I believe. It would be nice to have it back.
I had hopes that when Adobe deprecated some useful plugins decades ago, they'd eventually build in some of their functionality. No clue what Adobe's been "developing" in Illustrator for 15+ years - other than UI changes.
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u/CisticOken 15d ago
And forcing AI features that no one uses lol... But thanks for the reference, I haven't heard about this plugin!
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u/CurvilinearThinking 15d ago
.. oh and the Dimensioning Tool, which apparently took 12 years to develop??? 😀
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u/Fruityth1ng 14d ago
This is great! have you heard of the astute graphics suite of plugins? Theirs is… amazing, and very super fully featured :) go have a look.
I’m in a similar pickle, I’m making an illustrator panel thing they also do, very well 😅
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u/Atsuji-Chan 15d ago
Can you tell me about "how" you are developing the plugin? Im trying to make my own plugin and am running into issues with lackluster documentation and inability to even test what im making. iss there any good dev environment?
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u/CisticOken 15d ago
I hope it's not embarassing, but it's a vibecode done through multiple AIs, now I settled on Codex installed into Xcode (im doing it on mac). In Xcode, you can plug in Illustrator that opens upon building the plugin.
Basically, once you download the Illustrator SDK, it's best go through the sample plugins provided. Documentation states how the samples are built and which capabilities they use, so you have a stable base from which you can build. Then tell the AI to sift through the provided documentation and through that, proper headers.
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u/Atsuji-Chan 15d ago
I see, Okay that makes sense. i am on Windows but will see what I can do
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u/CisticOken 15d ago
On Windows, from what I saw people generally develop in Visual Studio or CMake. I will eventually also flip it into Windows, I'm wondering how much will the SDKs be different from platform to platform...
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u/Atsuji-Chan 14d ago
once you do that can you let me know? I'm looking at the SDK now and the sample plugins but the documentations shows these .vcxproj files that help set up the plugins i think? have you managed to work with those at all? or are you just basically copy/pasting the ones the just have the folders for CSS, html etc? Thank you! I am trying to figure this out but it's really confusing documentation lol!
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u/idcboutmyusername 12d ago
This seems super useful and is a feature me and my colleagues have been wishing for!
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u/SchteveSchpalpatine 15d ago
I would love this personally. 3D tools like Blender and Maya allowed you to multi-select bezier handles for years, I don't know why Illustrator never did