These are the controls you’ll need to get basic editing done.
Some keys are listed beside their corresponding menu items and therefore won’t be covered in this tutorial. This is more to document the more obscure key presses or ones that might not be obvious.
Cut/Copy/Paste
Basics
I know that you’re aware of what these do but I want to point out that they are pretty powerful in ToeTag. You can cut/copy/paste entities and brushes freely within your current level but what you may not realize is that you can also do it between levels.
Between Levels
Open up 2 levels at once and you can copy/paste between them! This is great for grabbing that slipgate you built in your other level or that cool teleporter brush work you painstakingly put together previously.
Faces
If you select a face and hit COPY, you can then select a bunch of other faces and hit PASTE. This will paste the texture settings from the first face onto all of the newly selected ones. This is amazingly useful for getting a room to have consistent texture alignment with minimal pain.
Technical Babble
Behind the scenes, ToeTag is copying text to the clipboard. Why is that important? Because that means you can freely edit whatever is going to be pasted. Try it! Copy something onto the clipboard inside of ToeTag, open up a text editor and hit PASTE. You will see the text that ToeTag placed on the clipboard. You can now freely edit it, select it, copy it and then go paste it back into ToeTag. You won’t do this very often of course but it’s nice to know it’s there.
Selections
Brushes & Entities
Selecting brushes and entities is pretty straightforward. Click them. If you click a brush it’s edges and vertices become available for selection as well. If you mis-click or otherwise make a mistake, just hit UNDO. Selections are fully incorporated into the undo/redo buffer in ToeTag.
Faces
To select a face, hold down SHIFT while you click. The face you click will highlight and you can then change the texture on it by clicking a texture in the texture browser.
You don’t have to select the brush first in ToeTag. Faces are always available for selection at any time.
Multiples & Toggling
To add to your current selection, hold down the CMD key while clicking. This works for brushes, entities and faces. For example, to select a face you hold down SHIFT and click it. To select more faces, hold down the CMD key while clicking.
This can also be used to turn selection off for something. Hold CMD and click it to toggle it’s selection status on/off.
This works the same for vertices and edges as well.
Dragging & Rotating
Dragging
With something selected, hold down the CTRL key and LEFT_MOUSE DRAG. In the 2D viewport, this will move the object along by grid increments.
It’s a little more complicated in the 3D viewport, but not much.
Holding down CTRL and LEFT_MOUSE DRAGging will still drag the object but it will do it along the axis that makes the most sense based on your camera rotation. For example, if you drag to the left, ToeTag will determine which axial direction is “most left” for you and drag along that. It sounds complicated but you’ll find that it’s very intuitive.
To drag something vertically in the 3D viewport, hold down the OPTION key at the same time. So it’s CTRL + OPTION + LEFT_MOUSE DRAG.
Rotation
Hold down CTRL and MIDDLE_MOUSE DRAG in the 3D viewport to rotate your selection around it’s vertical axis. If you have a single object select it will rotate on it’s own. If you have multiple objects selected, they will rotate as a group.
In the 2D viewport, rotation always happens around the axis you are looking down on. This is intuitive and you’ll see what I mean if you rotate something in the 2D viewport. Try it from various views and see what happens.
A short cut is to this is to hit the R key. This will rotate 5 degrees around whichever axis is most appropriate.
Grid Size
To change the size of the dragging grid in ToeTag, hit the number keys from 1 to 9. Each of these corresponds to a grid size setting.
1 - 1 Unit
2 - 2 Units
3 - 4 Units
4 - 8 Units
5 - 16 Units
6 - 32 Units
7 - 64 Units
8 - 128 Units
9 - 256 Units
You can also hit the [ and ] keys to move up or down one grid size from wherever you currently are.
Quick Groups
Quick Groups are an easy way to set up entities that need to stay together. Select the brushes/entities that you want to keep together and press CMD+G. That will set the group. Then, select a single object in that group and press CMD+OPTION+G and all of the other members of that group will be selected automatically.
One of the more powerful features here is that if you duplicate a set of brushes/entities that is part of a Quick Group, ToeTag will create a new quick group for the newly generated brushes/entities.
