The Pen Tool is not My Favorite Tool

At this point, I would like to take a moment to speak to you about Adobe’s Pen Tool. The Pen Tool is not a good tool. The Pen Tool is not even a bad tool. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad tools such as those found in Microsoft Paint. Having worked with it for several years now, my hate for the Pen Tool has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

And I don't care that O'Reilly is comparing it with a magic wand. It is terrible. Worse than terrible. The Pen Tool makes inconsistency an art form. If there are two different ways of creating or adjusting a path, the Pen Tool will do both, in random ways. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too.

Every click and every drag is as unpredictable as the one before. You can never know whether you will get what you are aiming at, or a mesh that takes longer to fix than to create. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that THIS particular anchor point should create a curve that bends around itself first, and NOT follow the overall curvature? Other anchor points in other places either follow the overall curvature or correlate to the direction of the initial drag. Either one of the last two behaviors would be fine. A sane tool would pick one of them. The Pen Tool, of course, uses all three, and more.

Trying to create something as simple as a circle with the Pen Tool is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a tool. Over the years, I tried many times to understand how I would go about taming this creature. To do this, I was picking blindly from dozens of books and classes all promising to demystify the Pen Tool’s usage.

None of them dares to mention the insanity of Adobe’s engineers, but instead charge you to make sense of their “strategies” on how they managed to make it somehow work. This always involves signing some sort of license beforehand (and in blood) in which you have to agree to not share their “secrets”, so that others may fall for it too. I can only imagine that they make this so complicated because they are intensely ashamed of having to deal with this abomination.

Were it within my power, I would gather every single application hosting a version of the Pen Tool and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
The Pen Tool is not my favorite Tool.