Adobe Illustrator: Can you turn off 45 degree snapping while shift-dragging?

Question

When holding shift while dragging an object, Illustrator automatically constrains that drag to 90 degree and 45 degree angles. Is it possible to turn off 45 degree snapping on drag? I often need to drag an object horizontally or vertically only a small amount, and it often snaps to the 45 degrees which makes the objects no longer aligned. I know you can adjust construction guide snapping lines, but from what I understand that doesn't apply to shift-dragging?

Best workaround right now is just using the arrow keys to nudge things or using the alignment tools after dragging, but that slows down the process, especially if the arrow key increment is higher than the amount I'm trying to drag.

Is this possible in Illustrator? If not, are there any plugins that achieve this functionality?

Answer 1

No this is to my knowledge not possible. Negative is though very, hard to prove. Been looking for this for ages. I mean it's not just the 90 and not using 45 angles in some drawings would be nice to be able to constrain them to other angles too.

If not, are there any plugins that achieve this functionality?

No there is no functionality in the programming interface for this. You would either have to re-implement all the tools, or ask Adobe the do it for you. So I don't see how there could be a plugin for it.

It is however possible that there could be a operating system level tool that overrides how the mouse gets presented to illustrator that could override this. But usually these are nasty to implement as they go very deep into security layers of the OS, and the tool wouldn't be portable between OSX and Windows.

Best workaround right now is just using the arrow keys to nudge things or using the alignment tools after dragging

Alternative workarounds that may or may not be faster.

1. Zoom closer
2. Use numeric input, line tool, move tool, rotate tool, scale, mirror, skew each allow you to type in distance and direction. I primarily use this as zooming closer is just annoying. Usually you can then use ctrl+d to repeat this as necessary.
3. Make your nudge increment smaller.
4. Record a numeric move with smaller nudge as action and assign it a hotkey.
5. Make a action to draw a support line and use a intersection instead.
6. Use a protractor block object. then drag that in place with white arrow tool and snapping, then snap to that.