Productivity editing

The productivity panel gathers the everyday layout-editing shortcuts into one place: an in-app clipboard, an array tool with a live preview, numeric move-by-delta, and a via-stack builder. Every change it makes to the document goes through the undo history, so anything the panel does can be undone and redone from the history panel.

The panel lives at the bottom of the right-hand side panel. Its window-free logic sits in the productivity module and is unit-tested without a GPU or a window; the panel itself is thin glue that binds widgets to that logic and routes the resulting edits through the editing history.

Clipboard: copy, cut, paste, and duplicate

Copy snapshots the current selection into an in-app clipboard as resolved shapes in top-cell coordinates. Because the clipboard holds geometry rather than selection indices, it survives later edits, undo, and selection changes.

Paste stamps the clipboard back into the top cell, shifted by the panel’s offset (dx, dy). Duplicate is copy-plus-paste in one step over the current selection, so it works on instanced geometry too: the duplicate is flat geometry drawn directly in the top cell.

Cut copies the selection and then removes it. Only shapes drawn directly in the top cell can be removed, because the model’s remove operation addresses a cell’s own shape list; any selected geometry that belongs to an instance or an array is copied but left in place, and the status line reports how many were skipped.

Move by delta

Move applies a numeric (dx, dy) shift to the selected direct shapes. A move is a remove of each original followed by an add of its translated copy, both through the history, so it undoes cleanly. As with cut, only directly-owned shapes move; instanced geometry is left in place.

Array tool

The array tool repeats the current selection into a grid of rows by columns at a given row pitch and column pitch. Element (0, 0) reproduces the selection in place, so the originals stay put and the grid grows from them.

With the live-preview checkbox on, the pending elements are outlined on the canvas before you commit, so you can dial in the counts and pitches and see the result first. Element (0, 0) is not drawn in the preview because it coincides with the existing selection.

The tool is for tractable, previewable repeats. The element count (rows times columns) is capped; past the cap the commit is refused and the panel says so. Very large regular repeats belong in a hierarchical array placement instead, which the renderer expands lazily rather than materializing every leaf shape.

On commit, each array element is added as its own edit, so each is individually undoable and the scene rebuilds once at the end.

Via-stack builder

The via-stack builder places a connecting cut between two picked layers together with the enclosure rectangles those layers need around it. You pick a lower layer, an upper layer, and the cut layer, set the cut’s square size, and place it at a chosen center.

The enclosure margin for each picked layer is read from the technology’s enclosure rules: the rule whose enclosing layer is that picked layer and whose enclosed layer is the cut layer. When several such rules apply, the largest margin wins so the drawn geometry satisfies all of them at once. A layer with no matching rule falls back to a default margin you can set in the panel, so the builder still produces a sane stack against a technology that omits the rule.

Each enclosure rectangle is the cut expanded outward by its margin, so it overlaps the cut on every side by at least the required amount. The cut and its two enclosures are placed as three separate edits, so the whole stack is undoable.

Undo integration

Everything here is built on the same contract: geometry helpers return owned shapes, and the panel wraps each in an add or remove edit applied through the editing history, then rebuilds the scene once. Nothing mutates the document directly. That is what keeps copy, paste, duplicate, move, array, and via placement all reversible from the history panel.