I would swear shift-clicking does this with the pen but it does not. Huh. I wonder when that stopped working, or if I am hallucinating that it ever did.

Workaround for pen: click elsewhere, hold down the button, use space to activate drag mode and position the point on top of the point you want to align with, but don't want to connect to.

Personally I find the pencil tool's auto-close to be aggressively useless. It would be much more useful to me if it looked at the *angle* of the beginning and end of the path, and only connected them if they matched. With the current implementation it auto-closes a ton of stuff that I have no need for it to close. I skipped the version where pencil auto-close was introduced without yet having a "don't autoclose" switch, it completely ruined my pencil-focused workflow.

Recently Illustrator finally allowed to stop Pencil from auto-joining with the dedicated 'Close paths when ends are within a set tolerance' option in Pencil Tool Options (https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/931888/suggestions/41727652)

However, sometimes this behaviour is welcome, and the decision to use it can be made on the go, while drawing. It’s not efficient to go to settings each time and toggle it.

I propose to utilize Cmd/Ctrl modifier key (while the mouse button is held / pen is pressed) to temporarily toggle the chosen behaviour — force join if it’s off, or forbid join if it’s on.

Right now when you draw a path with the pencil tool, it automatically closes the shape, incredibly annoying if you are trying to draw lines close together that don't connect. Should be a extremely easy fix, just adding an option to turn it off.

More times than not, I am drawing with the pen tool with no intention of connecting my new path to any existing paths. If there were an option with the pen tool that allowed it to connect to other shapes or ignore them I would not accidentally keep connecting my new shapes to other paths when I am simply trying to create a new shape.

When I have an opened path, I really often (really !) need to add a new path at the exact same place of the last anchor point of the first opened path.

See the image: it is impossible to not continue the first opened path.
We always need to block the first path in order to draw the new path without linking it to the first one.

I would like to click on the alt key in order to remove the / from the pen tool (on the image) in order to draw this new path independently.