Evenly Guides Sketch Plugin

This is a Plugin for Sketch App that adds guides to artboards. For the magic to shine it’s important to have the Ruler visible.

Installation

Install this plugin via Sketch Toolbox or download the package manually into to your Sketch3 Plugin folder. The path should resemble the following .../com.bohemiancoding.sketch3/Plugins/even-guides-sketch-master Tipp: The .sketchplugin file should reside in a directory!

Select any artboard you have in your document. If there aren’t any, go ahead and create a new one. (Pressing the A key is the fastes way to do so.) Afterwards either goto the plugins menu and select Evenly Distributed Guides -> Distribute Guides or use keyboard shortcuts (see below). A modal will appear where you can define the setup for the guides you aim to create.

Yes, I know…

Within Sketch there’s a specific feature for Layout Settings where you can define any rows and columns, gutter, display, colors, placement and so on. It’s very powerful and substantial but I find it too complex for most simple tasks.

My approach is speed: Sometimes you just need a grid or raster real fast, but with precise evenly distributed rows or columns. Once everything is aligned and at it’s place you can get rid of all these guides again. So, columns and/or rows and an optional gutter is enough. Optionally, when using a gutter you’re able to specify if you want to begin and end with gutters or columns & rows. Additionally before creating any guides you can choose to remove all existing onces. You can use this plugin with keyboard only. Just as fast as you generate helping guides, it’s possible to remove them again. The following keyboard shortcuts are helpful:

• Cmd + alt + g – Show the modal for generation (Setup)
• Cmd + alt + r – Removes all guides (After confirmation)
• Crtl+r – Toogle Ruler visibility (Shows or hides any guides too)

With a little help from my friends

I borrowed a few lines of code (some tiny helper functions related to artboard selection) from Nadav Savio‘s Sketch-Plugins. Great work, hope you don’t mind!

That’s all folks

This is my second Sketch Plugin, so please feel free to contact me via twitter for comments, suggestions and critique. Take a look at the first one here. If you like this plugin consider giving this repository a star! If you’re owning Bitcoin feel free to send some satoshis: 1BoFajaVNQ5Z8a3E7ZQvt8sWyTCGrxRtS9. Oh and of course you can fork and contribute to the code and extend this package. I will happily merge any tested PRs.