Navigating the Canvas

The canvas is an unbounded workspace, so you will pan and zoom constantly. Molkit gives you several routes to the same result: the mouse wheel, drag gestures that work with any tool, keyboard shortcuts, touch pinch, and a set of zoom controls in the status bar. Zoom ranges from 10% to 1000% (0.1x to 10x).

Panning

Mouse wheel scrolls the canvas vertically. Shift+wheel scrolls horizontally, which helps on mice without a tilt wheel.
Middle-click drag or right-click drag pans the canvas no matter which tool is active, so you never have to leave the Bond or Select tool just to move around.
The dedicated Pan tool (H) turns plain left-click drag into panning. Note that H cycles arrowhead styles instead when arrows are selected or the Arrow tool is active.

Zooming

Ctrl+wheel (Cmd+wheel on macOS) zooms toward the cursor, so the point under your pointer stays put while everything scales around it. Trackpad pinch gestures arrive through the same path and work identically.
On touch screens, a two-finger pinch zooms toward the center of the pinch.
+ and - zoom in and out in 20% steps. When atoms are selected, these keys adjust formal charge instead of zooming.
Ctrl+0 resets to 100% zoom and returns the view to the origin.
Ctrl+Shift+0 zooms to fit all content on screen.
Ctrl+Home centers the view on your content without changing zoom.

Status-bar zoom controls

The right end of the status bar holds a zoom slider, plus and minus buttons, and the current zoom percentage. The buttons step zoom by 20% around the center of the visible canvas; the slider sweeps the full 10% to 1000% range on a logarithmic scale.

Click the zoom percentage to type an exact value. The readout turns into a small number field accepting 10 to 1000. Press Enter to apply, or Esc to cancel and keep the current zoom.

Two adjacent buttons sound similar but behave differently:

Center View pans your content to the middle of the screen and leaves the zoom level alone (same as Ctrl+Home).
Zoom to Fit both pans and rescales so everything fits in the window (same as Ctrl+Shift+0).

Paged and slide documents

When the document uses a paged or slide layout, the View menu adds Fit Page and Fit Width, which frame the current page rather than your content’s bounding box. Both are disabled on the infinite canvas. See Page Setup for switching layout modes.

Auto-scroll while dragging

You do not need to drop an object to pan. Drag anything to within about 30 pixels of a canvas edge and the view starts scrolling in that direction, ramping up to full speed as you push past the edge. This works during any drag: moving atoms, drawing bonds, rubber-band selection, and so on.