Selecting, moving & deleting

Everything Airship generates is editable. The Edit tool (🏠, in the palette) is your main handle for houses and roads.

Select and move

With Edit active, click a house or road to select it, then drag to move it. A selected object shows edit handles. Click empty space to deselect.

Rotate

With an object selected, press [ and ] to rotate it. Hold Shift to constrain movement or rotation to steps.

Hold Shift to lock a drag to one axis

Shift means the same thing everywhere in the editor: it constrains the drag to a single axis and turns the auto-snap off, so the point goes exactly where you put it.

• Houses, parking spaces, objects and groups lock to the object's own axis, so a house slides along its frontage or straight out from it.
• Any point you drag — a road, shared drive or driveway anchor, a fence vertex, a car-park corner, an aisle anchor, a plot number or a text label — locks to horizontal or vertical, whichever way you started moving.

Snap

Turn on Snap (🧲) in the top bar to snap objects to roads, footways and each other for tidy alignment.

Add a house

Open 🏠 House in the palette and pick 🏠+ Place house, pick a type from the house-type selector in the top bar, then click on the plan to drop a house of that type — drag as you place to position it (it snaps to roads and neighbours), and press [/] or use its handle to rotate. Keep clicking to place more; click a house you've placed to nudge it. Press Esc (or click the tool again) to return to Edit. Placed houses behave exactly like generated ones.

Delete

Select an object and press the Delete tool (🗑) or the Delete key. On fences, Alt-click removes a single section.

Fence-wall: fences, walls & panel runs

Fence-wall ▸ Auto fences builds the garden and boundary fences from the layout, but it will not know about the ones that are particular to your scheme — a brick wall to the frontage, an acoustic barrier along a busy edge, a retaining wall on a level change, a line of temporary panels around a phase. The 🧱 Fence-wall group in the palette draws those.

They all draw the same way: click each point, then double-click or press Enter to finish. Esc cancels the run you are drawing and leaves you in the tool ready to start another; a second Esc leaves the tool. They behave like every other sketch tool — Shift locks the direction, points line up with corners already on the plan, and you can type an exact length and angle. A run is an open line, not a loop, so two points is a run. You stay in the tool afterwards, so you can draw one run after another.

Everything you draw goes in the same place and edits the same way, whatever its style: it extends and trims against its neighbours, reshapes by dragging a point, and is measured in the stats and priced in the appraisal — walls and temporary fencing on their own lines, at their own rates, rather than all at the timber-fence rate.

Designing a style

A style says what a run is. Height and thickness; the material and its colour; junction piers at every corner and both ends and intermittent piers at a spacing along the straights; a coping profile with its own material, thickness and overhang; and two switches that change how a run behaves rather than how it measures:

• Retaining — the run holds a level change, so it starts at ground rather than at garden level, and is marked in plan with ticks on the high side.
• Temporary — drawn dashed on the plan and shown translucent in 3D, so a phasing drawing reads at a glance.

The designer shows a live 3D preview built by the same code that builds the model, so what you see is what you will get, with a measured elevation beneath it. Twelve styles ship with the app — close-boarded, lap panel, post & rail, acoustic, bow-top railings, mesh, clipped hedge, brick at 900 mm and 1.8 m, natural stone, rendered, retaining and gabion. Those are read-only; Duplicate one to get a style of your own that you can edit.

Changing what a generated fence is

Fences from Auto fences are ordinary runs — select one and change its style like any other. But Auto fences makes hundreds of them, so two things make that practical:

• Auto fences builds in whatever fence style is current. Set the style you want first — a brick wall, railings, a hedge — and generate; the confirmation names the style before it replaces anything. You no longer have to generate close-boarded and change them afterwards.
• A whole selection restyles at once. Box-select or Ctrl/⌘-click any number of runs and pick a style; every one of them changes, and it is one undo step, not one per run. A selection with more than one style in it shows “— mixed —” rather than claiming they all match the first.

To restyle something already drawn, select it and pick a different style from the dropdown on the toolbar — a fence becomes a wall, a wall becomes a run of panels, in place and undoable. The 🎨 button beside it opens the designer on that run, and right-clicking the run gets you there too.

Fences: extend and trim

Click a fence to select it, then drag one of its end dots. As the end approaches another fence it snaps to the exact point where the two lines cross:

• Drag outwards and the fence extends to meet the other one.
• Drag back past a crossing and the overhang is trimmed off at the same point.

It runs along the fence's own line, so the two meet in a clean junction rather than a kink. Dragging a dot in the middle of a fence just moves that point as usual, and a fence running parallel to another never snaps to it — there is nothing to meet.