Cutting, copying, pasting, and deleting shapes

There’s nothing too new here if you’re familiar with these operations in other software. Inkscape supports the standard hotkeys for Cut (Ctrl + X), Copy (Ctrl + C), and Paste (Ctrl + V). Note that there are buttons for these functions in the Commands bar, as shown in Figure 2.17. I recommend using the hotkeys instead as they are far faster to use:

Figure 2.17 – The Copy, Cut, and Paste buttons in the Commands bar

Additionally, Inkscape supports Paste in Place (Ctrl + Shift + V), which will paste an object in the same location as the copied object (useful for copying/pasting between layers and groups, which we will see in Chapter 5, Node Editing – Modifying Your Shapes with Nodes and Curves).

Duplicating (Edit > Duplicate or Ctrl + D) is another way to Paste in Place without the need to copy first.

You can also drop duplicates of a selected object as you are dragging it...