Moving around the canvas
Pan, zoom, rotate and mirror the view: with the mouse, the trackpad, the keyboard, or the Hand and Rotate View tools.
Nothing you do on this page changes your artwork. Panning, zooming, rotating and flipping only move the view, and none of it reaches the export.
Every gesture here works under every tool, so you never have to swap tools to reposition the canvas.
Panning
Hold Space and drag with the left button, the way you would in Photoshop. The cursor becomes an open hand while Space is held, and a closed one while you drag. Dragging with the middle mouse button does the same thing without the keyboard. Either way, a pan that starts over the canvas keeps tracking even if the cursor wanders onto a docked panel.
The Hand tool (H) is the same pan on the left button, for tablets and pens where a middle button or a spare hand is awkward. It has no options and no other action.
Zooming
On Windows and Linux the mouse wheel zooms, centred on the cursor, so the point under the pointer stays put. One notch is a step of about 1.1x. Zoom runs from 5% to 10000%.
On macOS the wheel and the trackpad follow the system convention instead: a two-finger scroll pans horizontally and vertically, a pinch zooms around the cursor, and Command with the wheel zooms as a fallback for an external mouse. There is no setting to swap these behaviours. They follow the platform.
The zoom box at the right end of the bar above the canvas shows the current level and opens a list of presets: 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 and 800 per cent, applied around the centre of the view. From the keyboard, Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- step by 1.25x each press; those two stop at 3200% and 5%.
Ctrl+1 jumps to 100%. Ctrl+0 fits the canvas to the window, and also resets the view rotation to zero.
| Ctrl= | Zoom in one step |
| Ctrl- | Zoom out one step |
| Ctrl1 | Zoom to 100% |
| Ctrl0 | Fit the canvas to the window |
| Spacedrag | Pan |
| Middle-drag | Pan |
| CtrlSpacedrag | Rotate the view |
Rotating the view
Hold Ctrl and Space and drag to spin the canvas around its centre: useful for drawing a curve at a comfortable wrist angle. The Rotate View tool (R) does the same on a plain left-drag, and keeps tracking if you drag out over a panel. Rotation is absolute from the moment you press, so the canvas follows your hand rather than accelerating.
There is no angle snap while rotating. To straighten up, click the reset-rotation button on the bar above the canvas, or press Ctrl+0 to fit, which also clears the rotation.
Flipping the view
Two buttons on the bar above the canvas, Flip View Horizontal and Flip View Vertical, mirror what you see. Animators use this the way illustrators use a mirror: a face that looked right suddenly reveals its lean, and a pose reads as unbalanced the moment you flip it.
The flip is display only. Your layers are untouched, the mouse still lands where it appears to, and the project renders and exports unflipped whether the buttons are on or off. Both flips can be on at once, and each stays on until you switch it off.
When navigation is locked
Camera View frames whatever the camera sees, so panning and zooming are switched off there. Move the camera instead. The 3D view has its own navigation and ignores these gestures too.
The wheel is also ignored while you are dragging something on the canvas, so a stray notch mid-move cannot zoom out from under you.
Each open document keeps its own pan and zoom. Switch tabs and come back, and the view is exactly where you left it.