Vector points no longer act as drag anchors, really slowing down workflow. Maybe a modifier key to bring it back?

I think vector editing is now broken. 
why anchor points are now being transformed when I move them? This vector nodes grouping has no sense for me as a default option.. 

Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean — some of these ideas feel really questionable. With this update they’ve basically broken like 10-20% of the usual vector workflows, and now I’m stuck dragging vectors around random empty space, like c’mon

Hi! Thanks for this feedback.

@Faringo , I’m curious to hear more about the workflows that are broken. It sounds like the main concern is that you have to drag from the middle, not the edge, of the selection now. Is that right? I believe nothing about the snapping behaviors have changed with this update, so it should snap to other geometry in vector edit mode as it did before, but if anything about snapping has changed, that would definitely be a bug!

The new behavior here is modeled after the behavior outside of vector edit mode, where resizing and rotating happen at the corners, and you move by dragging anywhere in the middle. We hope that these behaviors can grow to feel intuitive for this reason!

​@Adam_J it’s hard to tell exactly what is happening in your video when the bezier handles suddenly disappear — are you doing something with the mouse? With a keyboard shortcut? (Is the bezier handle change expected in your video, and your post is about the ergonomics of moving those points with the new selection behavior?)

Oh, one of my teammates just figured out your video ​@Adam_J — are you nudging the points with the arrow keys when you lose the bezier handles? That is for sure a bug, and we will fix it ASAP!

Thanks for the reply!

The new behavior is modeled after how objects behave outside of vector edit mode, where resizing and rotating happen from the corners, and moving is done by dragging anywhere inside the object. I understand the intention — to make the interaction feel consistent and intuitive across modes.

However, in practice, this doesn’t feel intuitive at all. The issue isn’t just that I’ve been working in Figma for nine years and got used to the previous behavior. There’s also an objective usability concern.

When you’re inside vector edit mode, you’re working directly with anchor points. At that moment, you’re thinking about the shape as a collection of precise points, not as a single bounding box. For example, when connecting one rectangle to another at the corners, the natural action is to align one specific anchor point to another. Instead, the current behavior forces you into an awkward flow where you end up moving the entire shape by dragging it, rather than precisely positioning the corner point itself.

When working with precision, you want to manipulate exact anchor points — not the whole object. This slows down the workflow and makes the process feel less controlled.

A good analogy would be a large puzzle piece. Even if the piece is big, the tabs and blanks remain small and precise. You wouldn’t align two pieces by roughly pushing the entire shape into place — you would carefully align the tab with the corresponding blank. That’s the level of precision that feels natural in vector editing, and that’s what seems to be missing in the new behavior.

Yes this is correct - thank you

This is exactly the issue — as a user, when I point and drag a point, I want to MOVE the entire group of points it belongs to. That point should act as an “anchor” for the group while I’m dragging it.

What you have done breaks the standard and it feels sub-standard, which makes Figma vector editing very hard to use. The issue is that this feature doesn’t reflect how artists actually work or how vector tools are expected to behave. “It’s cool to scale all nodes in a group” — I get that — but for professionals this shouldn’t be the default behaviour.

The scaling feature itself is good, but it should be secondary, not primary. The primary action should be MOVE. When I drag a point, I expect the whole group to move with it. If I press something like ALT, then I should get the scaling behaviour instead.

And I forgot to mention one really important thing — previously, using vector points as dragging anchors gave you confidence that two points would merge into a single path when you moved one onto the other.

Now, sometimes they don’t align or snap perfectly, because you’re no longer moving the anchor itself, but the whole shape instead.

And I really don’t think this is just about precision or user control — it actually feels more like a bug, or a defect in this new interaction model where the entire shape is used as the anchor instead of the vector point itself. I mean, it seems like the new model doesn’t handle point snapping very well — sometimes (rarely, but still) it doesn’t recognize whether you’re trying to connect two points into one path or just place one on top of the other.

I’ve already run into this issue a couple of times while creating a new icon for our design system’s icon pack.

And a quick video showing the exact case — should help clarify things. If you think the rectangles in the video merge into one shape after the edit, you missed it — they remain separate shapes.

(btw, maybe this specific interaction is intentional, I think I didn’t have this trouble before the update, not sure, but it’s still a good example for the topic of the thread)

​@Adam_J lmao I’ve just found a solution — if you hold Shift while trying to move a point, it becomes available as a drag anchor. (not perfect, as you can see in the gif, but at least it’s a workaround) Once you start dragging, you can release Shift and move it freely, just like it worked before the update. The downside is that you still need to do this every time you want to move a point precisely.

​@Adam_J lmao I’ve just found a solution — if you hold Shift while trying to move a point, it becomes available as a drag anchor. (not perfect, as you can see in the gif, but at least it’s a workaround) Once you start dragging, you can release Shift and move it freely, just like it worked before the update. The downside is that you still need to do this every time you want to move a point precisely.

 

this is very helpful, thank you! 

Hey ​@Faringo ​@Adam_J , I really appreciate your thoughtful feedback here. We’re excited about the new functionality that this change enables, but of course the last thing we want to do is break any core workflows.

We’re working on a few changes that will hopefully help (and the thing you mentioned where the resize behavior is not snapping, and geometry doesn’t get merged, is a bug that we’re fixing).

I’ll get back to you here next week with some concrete updates. Again, we really appreciate your feedback!

It’s not clear what new functionality this change enables, and at the expense of very standard, expected vector behavior, as ​@Faringo so perfectly described:

When you’re inside vector edit mode, you’re working directly with anchor points. At that moment, you’re thinking about the shape as a collection of precise points, not as a single bounding box. For example, when connecting one rectangle to another at the corners, the natural action is to align one specific anchor point to another. Instead, the current behavior forces you into an awkward flow where you end up moving the entire shape by dragging it, rather than precisely positioning the corner point itself.

When working with precision, you want to manipulate exact anchor points — not the whole object. This slows down the workflow and makes the process feel less controlled.

When I’m working in vector edit mode, I want to be able to freely move a single, or multiple anchor points in order to create/manipulate the shape I want. I can do this one anchor at a time, but not with more than one. This means my workflow is less intuitive and longer.