UI design experiment: align and snap

Saturday 5 July 2025

When you have a canvas full of videos and images, it won’t take long before you get the urge to make them all line up neatly. That’s not a new thing. Many applications allow you to do that, but they all do it slightly differently. So, when I set out to implement aligning and snapping in the rich video editor, I had to decide which application to mimic and I decided to copy none of them. Or maybe all of them. I mixed a lot of things that are already out there and created something new out of it. Will it work? I don’t know.

But if you want to know, you can give it a try yourself. I’m about to show you how it all works, but the main challenge of experimenting with UI design is that it’s hard to know if the UI will be intuitive to people. Sure, you understand how it works after I’ve explained it, but that’s not the real test. If you truly want the opportunity to yell at me for how foolish I was to come up with my own UI design, you should give it a go right now.

The clip you see here is not centered. That’s obvious. It’s also foreshadowing, because I’m going to center it. Click on the how to-tab to see how that works.

Of course, we can also align clips to other clips. I mean, these two clips would look much better if their bottoms were aligned.

Alignment mode automatically aligns the sides that are closest together, but that’s not always what you want.

This is a bit of a mess. Click on the after-tab to see what it’s supposed to look like.

That’s how you align clips in the rich video editor. It is still very much an experimental feature. I think it works well so far, but you know how it is with these things: only when you’ve been using them for a while will you run into all the small annoyances that make you wish you were on a higher floor, so you could have a more satisfying smash when you throw your computer out of the window. So, why don’t you give it a try? Let me know how it goes.