Better ways to work with the pen tool

Question

I'm finding the pen tool a real aggravation to use... first off you cannot hardly see the points once a path is completed.  Even blowing the artwork up really big doesn't help much.
Then its really easy to loose the ability to move individual points... at least I've found that at one point I can select and move the points easily with keyboard and somehow I loose that ability and seems to difficult to regain it.  Instead I'm moving the whole path.
I wondered if any of the plugins out there might be dedicated to making the pen tool points easier to manipulate and edit.  Just making them easily visible would probably be enough.

Answer 1

Jacob Bugge wrote:
Harry,
The Direct Selection Tool is the one to use for moving Anchor Points after the path has been drawn. Always work on paths without anything selected when you start; this is one place where Smart Guides are your friends because they let you see highlights of what you may select.
If you Click an Anchor Point, you will see that it is shown as a filled square; the other (non selected) Anchor Points are shown as hollow squares; you can select additional Anchor Points by ShiftClicking them.
With the desired Anchor Point(s) chosen, you may ClickDrag (either of them), or use the Arrow keys, or Object>Transform>Move, to move it/them.
You can also ClickDrag across the desired Anchor Point(s), starting from an empty spot with no fill (normally outside the path).
If I'm following you above... I do not see that behavior here.  I speaking particularly of your third and fourth points.
You are talking about doing point 3 and 4 with direct select right?
To make it simple I'll just work with one point on a closed path  :... I first click on an empty part of art board, then click a single point.  At that point all the points light up and show there handles.  The clicked one is a solid red dot, the others are a hollow dot with red stroke.
Now according to what I got of your comments, I should be able to move that single selected point with the arrow keys.... but I cannot.
Far as point 4, same thing applies... It is good to know that I can select multiple points that way, but after selecting ... the keyboard arrows do nothing to the selected points.   But at least I can quickly pull mutiple points around with the mouse... so thanks for that bit.
Are you able to select a point on a closed path, and control it with arrow keys?
Is there some circumstance I may have initiated inadvertantly that would prevent the arrow keys moving points around.
I pretty sure there was while early on where I was moving individual points with keyboard but cannot get it to happen now.