facepalm at ue4 settings. I didn’t find the screen posted in that last link of yours, but it got me thinking that maybe I need to disable it from elsewhere. So I searched editor preferences for “actor snap” and found a shortcut. Then I pressed the shortcut and snapping was off, even though it displayed “Surface Snapping” disabled. Apparently the shortcut has no effect on that ui toggle - bug. So I removed the hotkey bind so as to not accidentally press it. That was so annoying. Thank you very much for helping.