Manipulators

    Silo provides the option for manipulator-based editing, meaning that the editing geometry can be done by clicking and dragging on the handles of an on-screen manipulator, or by holding Ctrl and dragging to perform the manipulators' actions in the plane of the screen. The different handles of the geometry manipulators allow you to restrict your scaling, rotation, and translation to certain axes.  Many of Silo's operations are based on the position of the manipulator. There are five basic manipulator modes: universal, move, scale, rotate, and no manipulator. Additionally, a tool manipulator with spherical handles will appear while using some tools, such as bevel. These tools are interactive, and dragging on any of the handles will modify the effect of the tool, e.g. change the amount of bevel.  The different handles of the tool manipulator do not perform different functions.

Default manipulator hotkeys:
q - Universal manipulator
w - Move manipulator
e - Scale manipulator
r - Rotate manipulator
t - No manipulator

    In the default mouse setup, if you hold down Ctrl while nothing is selected and keep it pressed you will enter a "tweak" mode that allows you to click, drag, and release to quickly select, transform, and deselect components (the transformation will depend on which manipulator you have selected). You will automatically leave this tweak mode when you release Ctrl.  Using the Mouse Setup dialog, however, you can assign this tweak mode ("Tweak Select") to any mouse button/modifier combination.

    You can also work completely without the manipulator or with only the alternate manipulator (set the visibility of each in the Display menu).  When using no manipulator, you'll want to assign the constrain functions (Constrain To X Axis, Constrain To Screen, etc) to keyboard shortcuts or mouse buttons to replace the need to click on manipulator handles.