Hotkey to build grids of buildings?

If you click and drag to build energy storage, it lays them out in a square with the centre where you clicked the mouse. I find that a bit annoying because it's difficult to judge where to click so you can build the number you want. You also can't build rectangular grids.

Clicking and dragging on factories and energy generators lays them out in a line. I think it'd be useful to be able to hold a modifier key so after you've dragged out a line, you could press the key then drag at 90 degress to create a grid of buildings so you can easily queue them up. Is this possible? At the moment I'm having to lay out multiple lines of energy generators to create a grid which is a bit tedious.

It'd also be cool if after you drag out a line of defensive buildings like laser canons if you could use the arrow keys to alter the density, i.e. drag out a line then press the up cursor key to increase the number of guard towers in the line, or press the down cursor key to reduce it. All towers would be equally spaced. This way you could easily build lines of towers with whatever spacing you wanted to without manually building each one. Is this also possible?