Product Update: Vector Pins, Measurement Overhauls, and ALIGN Polish

#changelog #webdev #cad #engineering

Hey everyone! We’ve been heads-down refining our canvas experience following the ALIGN milestone (July 8–10, 2026). This update brings highly requested

drafting precision, UX quality-of-life improvements, and a handful of crucial bug fixes.

Let’s dive into what’s new! 👇

✨ New Feature: Vector Pins (Object Snap Tracking)

We are incredibly excited to introduce Vector Pins, bringing powerful tracking points to your drafting workflow. Refined across 10 precise commits, this feature dramatically improves alignment accuracy without needing extra construction lines.

How it works: Hover over any grip point for 500ms to "pin" it. Each active pin projects dynamic horizontal and vertical reference lines that your cursor automatically snaps onto, complete with dashed guides and accent markers.
Angle-Locked Rays: Ortho and polar inputs now intelligently snap to intersections with pin reference lines. This is fully supported across line drawing, circle radii, arc picks, and polylines (which we ported onto DirectionalInputCommand to make this possible!).
Persistent Lifecycle: Pins survive across sequential actions so you can use them seamlessly with MOVE or COPY. However, to keep your canvas clean, they are automatically cleared when a brand-new command fires or when the active command finishes.
Under the Hood 🛠️: To keep our codebase maintainable, we decoupled the pin logic from CanvasComponent into a dedicated VectorPinsService. We also centralized the angle-lock anchor capture inside updateAngleLock, eliminating redundant per-command overrides.

📏 Revamped Measurement Tools

We’ve overhauled the DISTANCE and ANGLE tools to make taking quick canvas metrics much less frustrating.

Sticky Results: Measurement overlays now stay on your screen until you explicitly hit Escape, rather than vanishing the moment you move your mouse.
Endpoint Grips: The DISTANCE tool now displays interactive grips at both endpoints for better visual context.
Improved UI States: Both tools now leverage your system's accent color—rendering as dashed lines while actively picking, and turning solid once the measurement is locked.
Control Bar: Polished the ANGL display component in the control bar for better readability.

🧭 ALIGN Polish & UI Refinements

Following the initial rollout of the ALIGN command, we spent time ironing out the UX kinks:

Copy Consistency: Updated all prompt text to match our standard command vocabulary (e.g., using "pick" uniformly).
Icon Redesign: The Align toolbar icon underwent a beautiful 7-commit redesign. It now features clean grip-to-grip dashed connections, a perfectly vertical solid right boundary line, and a flipped layout to maximize visual clarity. Its dashed-line width now perfectly matches the Offset icon.
Layout Organization: Swapped the positions of Align and Fillet in the edit panel for a more intuitive tool grouping.

🐛 Fixes & Visual Tweaks

Viewport Isolation: Fixed a frustrating bug where model-space entities could accidentally be selected through layout viewports.
Color Standardization: Intersection X markers are now drawn in the system accent color instead of green, keeping our UI palette unified.

What do you think of the new Vector Pins? Let us know in the comments below or drop your feature requests! 🚀
https://kulmanlab.com