Navigating the Canvas

The canvas has no edges, so moving around it is something you do constantly. Zoom runs from 10% to 1000%, and every method below works while any drawing tool is active.

Panning

• Turn the mouse wheel to scroll the canvas up and down. Hold Shift while turning it to scroll sideways, which helps on a mouse without a tilt wheel.
• Drag with the middle or right mouse button to pan with any tool, so you can stay in the Bond or Select tool while you move around.
• The Pan tool (H) turns an ordinary left-button drag into panning. When arrows are selected or the Arrow tool is active, H cycles arrowhead styles instead.

Zooming

Action	Result
Ctrl+wheel (Cmd+wheel on macOS)	Zooms toward the pointer; the point under the pointer stays put. Trackpad pinch works the same way.
Two-finger pinch on a touch screen	Zooms toward the center of the pinch.
+ / -	Zoom in or out in 20% steps. With atoms selected, these keys change formal charge instead.
Ctrl+= / Ctrl+-	Zoom in or out in 20% steps, even with atoms selected. Only the canvas zooms, not the browser page.
Ctrl+0	Reset View: back to 100% zoom with the view at the origin.
Ctrl+Shift+0	Zoom to Fit: fits all content in the window.
Ctrl+Home	Centers the view on your content without changing zoom.

Reset View and Zoom to Fit are also in the View menu. Clicking a row in the Named Selections panel zooms to that selection.

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 zoom in 20% steps around the center of the visible canvas. The slider covers the whole 10% to 1000% range on a logarithmic scale.

To set an exact zoom, click the percentage. It becomes a number field that accepts 10 to 1000; press Enter to apply or Esc to keep the current zoom.

Two nearby buttons look alike but do different things. Center View pans your content to the middle of the window and leaves the zoom alone (the same as Ctrl+Home). Zoom to Fit pans and rescales so everything fits (the same as Ctrl+Shift+0).

Paged documents

In a document with pages, View > Fit Page and View > Fit Width frame the current page instead of your content. Both menu items are greyed out on the infinite canvas. The Fit Page button in the action bar works on the infinite canvas too, where it fits your content like Zoom to Fit. PageDown and PageUp move between pages. See Page Setup & Pages to switch a document to pages.

Navigating from the keyboard

You can move around a drawing without a mouse. Press Tab until the canvas has focus, then use the arrow keys to move a keyboard cursor from atom to atom. See Drawing from the keyboard.

Auto-scroll while dragging

Drag anything to within about 30 pixels of a canvas edge and the view scrolls in that direction, speeding up as you push past the edge. This works for every kind of drag, including moving atoms, drawing bonds and rubber-band selection.

Next: the Select Tool and Bond Tool pages. For a list of every key, see Keyboard Shortcuts.