How to Move and Copy Objects in SketchUp (M)

Pressing M activates the Move tool, SketchUp's primary way of repositioning selected geometry by clicking and dragging — but its most genuinely powerful behavior is a modifier key that turns the same tool into a fast object-duplication method. **Basic move behavior**: with geometry selected and the Move tool active, clicking anywhere on that geometry and dragging relocates it to wherever you release the mouse, with SketchUp's inference engine snapping to nearby points, edges, and axis directions along the way to help you land on a genuinely intentional position rather than an arbitrary one. **The Ctrl/Option modifier for copying**: holding Ctrl on Windows (Option on Mac) while dragging with Move switches its behavior from relocating the original to instead leaving the original exactly in place and creating a duplicate at the new position — visually indicated by a small plus sign appearing next to the cursor once the modifier is held, confirming you're now in copy mode rather than plain move mode. **Creating multiple evenly spaced copies at once**: after making one copy this way, typing a number (like "x6") and pressing Enter immediately afterward tells SketchUp to create that many additional evenly spaced copies continuing in the same direction and at the same interval as your first copy — a genuinely fast way to array a repeated element (fence posts, evenly spaced shelf brackets, a row of identical windows) without manually repeating the copy-drag motion once for each individual instance. **Precise numeric movement**: like most SketchUp tools, typing an exact distance value after starting a Move drag and pressing Enter overrides the freehand drag with that precise value, essential for moving something an exact, specific distance rather than an approximate one judged by eye. **Move and axis locking**: SketchUp's colored axis indicators (typically red, green, and blue for the three model axes) highlight during a Move drag when your movement is constrained to exactly one of those axes, and pressing the corresponding arrow key (or holding Shift in some configurations) can lock movement to a specific axis deliberately — useful for ensuring an object moves purely horizontally or purely vertically without any accidental diagonal drift from an imprecise mouse drag. **Moving components versus raw geometry**: moving a Component or Group (a bundled, reusable set of geometry) moves the whole bundle as one unit, while moving raw, ungrouped geometry that happens to be touching other ungrouped geometry can inadvertently drag connected edges along with it, potentially distorting shapes you didn't intend to touch — this is one of the practical reasons experienced SketchUp users group or componentize meaningful chunks of a model early, specifically to prevent this kind of accidental cross-contamination during later Move operations. **Related tools**: Rotate (Q) and Scale (S), both covered on the modification-tools category page, are the natural companions to Move for a complete repositioning-and-resizing workflow, and all three share the same underlying typed-precision (Value Control Box) input pattern for exact numeric control rather than relying purely on freehand dragging. **Mistake to avoid**: forgetting to hold Ctrl/Option before starting the drag, then realizing partway through that you meant to copy rather than move, is a common small frustration — pressing Ctrl/Option mid-drag (rather than before starting it) generally still works to switch into copy mode as long as you haven't released the mouse button yet, so it's recoverable in the moment rather than requiring you to undo and start over from scratch.