How to Use Grab (Move) in Blender (G)

Pressing G activates Grab, Blender's move transform, letting you reposition the current selection either freely with mouse movement or with exact typed numeric precision — one of the three foundational transform tools alongside Rotate and Scale. **Freehand movement**: pressing G and then moving the mouse repositions the selection in real time following your cursor, with the movement direction determined by your current viewport angle unless you've constrained it to a specific axis, confirmed with a left-click or Enter once positioned correctly. **Typed numeric precision**: pressing G and then immediately typing a number (before making any mouse movement, or even mid-drag) applies that exact value as the movement distance in Blender's current scene units, letting you move an object by precisely 2.5 units, for instance, without needing to open a separate properties panel and manually type into a numeric field. **Axis constraints**: typing X, Y, or Z immediately after pressing G restricts movement to that single axis alone, useful when you want to move an object purely horizontally or vertically without any accidental drift on the other axes during a freehand mouse drag. Pressing the same axis letter twice constrains to that axis in the object's local coordinate space rather than the global scene space, relevant when an object has been rotated and its own local axes no longer align with the world's global axes. **Combining constraint and precision together**: typing G, then X, then a number moves the selection exactly that distance along the X axis specifically — this combination (axis constraint plus typed value) is the single most common precise-movement pattern experienced Blender users rely on constantly. **Related shortcuts**: R for Rotate and S for Scale, following an identical interaction pattern applied to different transform types, and Left Click/Enter versus Right Click/Escape for confirming or canceling any in-progress transform. **Combining with proportional editing**: enabling Proportional Editing (O) before invoking Grab makes nearby unselected vertices move partially along with the grabbed selection, falling off smoothly with distance, useful for organic deformation like pushing a bump into a mesh's surface rather than moving an isolated hard-edged selection. **Grabbing along a custom axis**: beyond the standard X, Y, Z global axis constraints, typing an axis letter twice (like XX) constrains movement to that axis in the object's local coordinate space rather than the global scene space, relevant once an object has been rotated and its own local axes no longer align with the world's. **Snapping during a grab**: holding Ctrl while dragging (with snapping enabled via Shift+Tab) causes the grabbed selection to jump to fixed increments or nearby geometry targets rather than moving completely freely, useful for precisely aligning an object against existing geometry without needing to type an exact numeric distance. **Mistake to avoid**: pressing G and typing a number without first checking whether an axis constraint is active can produce unexpected results, since a typed number applies to whichever constraint (or lack thereof) is currently in effect — typing '2' immediately after G alone moves along the view-relative default, while typing '2' after G then X moves exactly 2 units along the X axis specifically; conflating these two sequences is a frequent early-learning mistake. **Grabbing with the 3D cursor as a temporary pivot**: while Grab itself doesn't use a pivot point the way Rotate and Scale do, positioning the 3D cursor at a specific location first (Shift+Right-Click) and then snapping a grabbed object to it (via the Snap menu, Shift+S) is a common combined workflow for precisely relocating an object to match another object's exact position without needing to read and manually type coordinate values. **Grab in different editors behaves consistently**: the same G key with the same numeric-and-axis-constraint pattern works identically in the UV Editor for repositioning unwrapped UV islands, and in the Graph Editor for moving animation keyframes, which means learning Grab's interaction pattern once in the 3D viewport pays off directly in these other editing contexts without needing to relearn a different set of controls.