If you select with the selection tool (black pointer) it will be impossible to drag and snap an anchor point that coincides with a corner of the transform bounding box that shows by default when you select with the black pointer. This is how all objects are created the Rectangle tool - the corners of the bounding box coincides with the four anchor points of the object and you cannot drag the object by an anchor point but scale it instead. You can but you have to turn off Show Bounding Box from the View menu.

If you don't hold Ctrl while dragging to show you that you are intersecting the mouse pointer with a path this will not ensure snapping of the mouse pointer with the path when you drop. You will need this when dragging by an anchor point or if you want to snap to a particular spot on the path. For example, you may have an object and a guide intersect and you want to drag, snap, and rotate around this intersecting point when aligning it to another object.

Yes, if you don't need to drag by an anchor point you don't need to switch  tools, any selection tool will do it. And if you don't need to snap the point under the mouse to the path of the other object you don't have to hold Ctrl to see the snapping labels - just move the object with any tool or method that can move it and only make sure that the desired paths are intersecting regardless where.

ashtangakasha wrote:

 

... With a selection tool, you have to use the Control key to snap to the intersect, but with the rotation tool, you don't.

You need to hold Ctrl only when dragging objects with the selection tools. The selection tools will still show all snapping elements if you just hover the mouse over objects.

I'm not sure as to why they made it necessary to hold Ctrl in order to show all snapping elements when dragging with the selection tools. I don't see how this makes things better in any way. What will be really useful is if there was a toggle keyboard key that when pressed turns on or off the smart guides on the fly without interrupting the workflow. For example, currently when drawing a path with the pen tool, in order to turn on or off the smart guides, you have to interrupt the path drawing process.

Actually, what I'd use the most is a new shift that momentarily turns OFF Smart Guides. We use the spacebar as a shift for moving objects while drawing, and we could use, say, the Tab key to momentarily toggle the current state of the (new, all-inclusive) Smart Guides mode.

I don't think you can do it with just the direct select tool, but you can select an object in a group with Alt-DirectSelect, and then select another object outside the group (either with Alt-DirectSelect, or by switching to Select), and then (here you must switch to Select) select the already-selected grouped object and make it the key object.

The trick is that Alt-clicking with Direct Select just toggles the selection even when multiple objects are selected. So you have to go to the Select tool to set the key object.

I hope this helps -- it saves you from Ctrl-Shift-G all the time, but you do have to go back and forth between Direct Select (white arrow) and Select (black arrow).