In the status bar, you will notice that the first icon looks like a grid, as in the following screenshot:

This option toggles the visibility of the grid lines in the drawing area. You can also use the F7 function key to toggle its visibility.

The grid lines look like lines on a graph paper and they merely represent lines and you can't actually "snap" to them. The grid lines are made with two types of lines: major lines and minor lines. Major lines are the bold lines that make up big blocks and minor lines are the lighter ones that further divide these major blocks into smaller segments, as shown:

In the following example, we will learn how to modify the spacing of the default grid:

1. To adjust the spacing between these grid lines, right-click on the grid mode icon in the status bar and click on Grid Settings.
2. The Drafting Settings window will open up with Snap and Grid as the active tab. In this tab, you will find all the grid-related settings in the panel to the right, as shown:

3. To change the spacing of the grid lines, go to the Grid spacing panel and change the Grid X spacing: and Grid Y spacing: values to any other value. In this case, I will change the X and Y spacing values to 5 units.
4. The next option, Major line every:, will control the number of smaller blocks that a major line will be added after. I will change this value to 10 units.
5. After making these changes, click on OK to close the Drafting Settings window to apply the changes. The grid with its updated parameters will look as in the following screenshot:

6. Here, you can clearly see that the major lines are now formed after every 10 grid blocks in both the X and Y directions and the distance between the major lines in both the X and Y directions is 5 units.
7. I will once again go to the Grid spacing option in the Drafting Settings window and I will change the X and Y spacing to 1 unit and Major line every: to 10, as shown:

8. Click OK to close the Drafting Settings window and save these changes. Now, the grid lines are spaced as follows:

The grid lines are dynamic and can be changed as per the scale of the drawing. In this case, apart from an approximate visual reference, the grid line has nothing much to offer; but, when used in conjunction with snap mode, this becomes a really useful tool for making drawings. We will discuss the snap mode feature later in this chapter but before we get to that, let's learn more about grid spacing and the way the grid looks in the next section.