The other function of the Selector tool, apart from selecting objects, is transforming them.
2.7 Transforming is simply an umbrella term for moving, scaling (resizing), rotating, and skewing. The first two of these—and especially moving—are extremely common in vector work because it’s nearly impossible to create objects at once in the exact place and with the exact size you need. You will find yourself moving stuff around all the time, so you need to learn how to do this quickly and precisely.
Note
All four transformation modes treat an object as a whole. By transforming, you can move, squeeze, rotate, or skew the entire object, but you cannot move one part of the object relative to the other parts; that’s a task for other tools. For example, if the nose in your drawing of a face is a separate object, you can make it larger on the face using nothing but the Selector tool. But if the nose is part of the same object as the rest of the face, you will need to use other tools to make the nose larger without also changing the face.
Moving the selection using the Selector tool is very simple: Just drag any of the selected objects with your mouse. If you have more than one object selected, dragging any one of them moves them all together.
One very common operation is duplicating objects, or making an exact copy of the selection. To do this, press 
; a copy is created and placed exactly over the original selection (so it does not seemingly change). Just drag it away with the Selector tool to where you want to place the copy. You can also use the traditional copy-and-paste method of duplicating objects (
, 
).
Other types of transforming are a little more difficult. Notice that whenever you have anything selected, the selection is surrounded by eight arrow marks. Dragging any of these arrow marks performs scaling: This is how you make your selection larger, smaller, taller, wider, and so on. The four corner arrows can move in any direction, resizing the selected objects freely; the four others move only in one direction (the top center and bottom center marks move vertically, the left center and right center move horizontally).
For the remaining two transformation modes, rotate and skew, you need to click anywhere on any already selected object, or alternatively press 
. Notice how the arrow marks change; now your selection is in the rotate mode, as opposed to the scale mode we used before (Figure 2-14). Now, dragging any of the four corner arrows rotates the selection around its center, while the four other arrows skew the selection. Also, you can still move your selection around by dragging while it’s in the rotate mode. To go back to the scale mode, click the selection or press again. Next time you select these or other objects, they will again be in the scale mode first.
If you prefer to control Inkscape from the keyboard, you won’t be surprised to learn that the four arrow keys each move the selection in the corresponding direction. More interestingly, the left and right angle brackets (
and 
) scale the selection down and up, correspondingly, while the square brackets, (
and 
), rotate it. There are no shortcuts for skewing objects.
That’s all there is to the basic transformations of objects with the Selector tool. Again, there are many more tricks, shortcuts, and rules of thumb that we’ll discuss later, but for now this should suffice for getting a general feel of how Inkscape works.