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Building rectangles and squares in Locus, and how each tool places its points.
Locus gives you a couple of ways to lay down four-sided shapes, each suited to a different way of thinking about the shape you want. This page covers the rectangle and square tools.
There are two rectangle tools, and the difference is which corners you click.
The XY-aligned rectangle stays square to the horizontal and vertical axes. You place it by clicking two opposite corners - one corner and the corner diagonally across from it. Whatever you drag, the sides stay aligned to the grid.
The directed rectangle can sit at any angle. You place it by clicking two adjacent corners - that first edge sets both the length and the tilt of the rectangle - and then setting the width of the opposite side. You can set that width two ways: by clicking a through point that the far edge should pass through, or by typing a width value directly. This is the tool to reach for when you want a rectangle rotated off the grid.
The square tool works like the directed rectangle's first two clicks, but the shape is locked square. You click two adjacent corners to set one side, and the other side is turned a fixed 90 degrees from it - so the width always matches the side length automatically. No third click needed.
Tip
You can also get a true square straight from the XY-aligned rectangle by holding Shift while you place the second corner - it forces equal width and height. See Constraining creation with Shift.
Rectangles and squares draw as an outline group, not a filled block of color. Each one is a tidy bundle of its four corner points and four boundary segments, kept together as a group. This matches Locus's "draw the curves, fill on demand" approach - you get editable outline geometry you can fill later if you want, rather than a solid region forced on you up front.
Because the corners are real points, you can drag any corner to resize, and the shape stays a proper rectangle as you do. Deleting the rectangle removes its whole group cleanly. A rectangle with zero width or height is rejected, so you can't accidentally create a flat one.
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- In the node graph: Rectangle: XY-Aligned | Rectangle: Directed | Square - build the same rectangles as nodes.