Grid snapping for deconstruction planner

[Bocian]

TL;DR

Let us set grid snapping on deconstruction planner just like on blueprints.

What ?

I work with rail blueprints a lot (https://factorioprints.com/view/-MFIYLSH60wmZ-pNvcL_) and often find myself in a situation where I want to delete a piece somewhere and replace it with another one, so I take out a reconstruction planner and delete the part I want to replace. Here is the result:
It's not the greatest example for obvious reasons, but you get what I mean.
Now, I have to fill the gaps myself, and in some situations missing by a tile can mess up some blueprints. For example in those rails signals are placed exactly 6 car lengths apart, so placing it one tile to the side would make it so a 6 car train wouldn't fit. In this situation, the only solution that would work without a chance to fail would be to find the blueprints I have on the sides and place them there again. Doing this takes a bit of time and could be made faster and more convenient by just having a deconstruction planner with a grid-snapping similar to the one those rails have. I'm sure it would be useful in other situations too, It's just the one that comes to my mind first.

Why ?

Working with grid-snapped blueprints would be more convenient.

[causa-sui]

+1. Every session I'm placing grid-aligned blueprints just because I deleted an adjacent piece and accidentally cut too close to the bone.

There are many ways to achieve this, but one option might be to provide something like a ctrl-shift-click with a blueprint that inverts the blueprint behavior, i.e., it now removes matching entities rather than placing them in spaces where they are missing.

[Kyralessa]

It seems like this would require a placed item to "remember" that it was placed by a blueprint instead of manually, and somewhere it would also have to be remembered which pieces were placed at the same time as part of the same blueprint.

[BicycleEater]

I really like this idea, but there are already a lot of shortcuts/key combinations when working with blueprints.
To simplify this, we could have these settings be in the deconstruction planner - so that you can have a grid aligned deconstruction planner, a fixed size deconstruction planner, or other combinations.
I do love the idea of a deconstruct blueprint mode though, so maybe have another way of making deconstruction planners, which will only destroy matching entities. These do not need to remember which entities were made by blueprint, only deconstruct matching.

Now I think about it, the deconstruction and upgrade planners have always been much less capable than blueprints.
In a similar spirit, perhaps a grid upgrade planner, and a targetted upgrade planner, to upgrade only the entities in a given position.
You could even have difference planners, which change one blueprint into another, effectively a combination of deconstructing, upgrading and placing new buildings, so that an old arrangement can be completely renewed, without disturbing it too much, particularly if it involves lots of very full chests, so deconstructing the lot would be difficult.

[Bocian]

An option for blueprints to deconstruct unmatching entities, even if they are player built would also be great. For example, in the book I've linked in the original comment - which is a rail book - each rail blueprint has an alternative version with solar panels and accumulators. Then I have a selection of blueprints used to pull a single lane to create an entrance or an exit to a station. It works great and gives you a lot of freedom in choosing where to put that entrance/exit exactly when you're putting it on the version with no solar panels. When the panels are there, then it doesn't work that well anymore:

If I could somehow make the blueprint mark all the entities blocking it - even if placed by the player - for deconstruction, it would work just as well as if there were no solar panels.

It could be done through a keyboard shortcut or maybe a checkbox in the blueprint window - this would be enough in a situation I'm describing, but the shortcut option would be more versatile.

Something similar has already been suggested here:
viewtopic.php?p=509813#p509813