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When I move controls I cannot touch them or overlay them in Free Design Layout. I know this can be done with Absolute Layout, however absolute does not allow you to align/or resize multiple controls (the Align and Same Size menus get blured out).
In general yes, this would be desirable. For touching you can actually set the gap between the components to 0 size. It is not very usual to have touching components so I'm not sure if such positions should be offered when dragging components by the user (i.e. snap to other components without a gap). It might actually make it harder to design usual layouts. Setting the gap to zero size is not very intuitive, but a possible workaround for now. As for overlaying components, bug 73463 is exactly about that. The Free Design needs to be learned to accept overlaying components. As a workaround it is also possible to use GridBagLayout where the components can be set to occupy the same cell. You can either design the whole form in GridBagLayout, or just a subpanel containing only the overlaying components.