Paul Dufour is back for the next installment of the How-To series. By his own admission, he’s “a mouse guy” but there’s a short list of keyboard shortcuts he reaches for constantly, and this episode walks through all of them.
What You’ll Learn: A handful of Canvas X Draw shortcuts that speed up the parts of drawing you do constantly by moving around your view, duplicating objects, and keeping shapes perfectly square or round and without needing to memorize a long reference card.
The Shortcuts (Mac):
- View navigation. Hold Option and roll the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Hold Option + Spacebar and left-click to zoom in, right-click to zoom out, or drag to draw a zoom box. Hold Spacebar by itself to pan the view around.
- Copy and paste. Command-C / Command-V pastes to the center of your current view, ready to drag into place.
- Group and ungroup. Command-G groups selected objects; Command-U ungroups them.
- Duplicate. Command-D this is Paul’s favorite. Duplicate an object, move the copy where you want it, then keep pressing Command-D: Canvas X Draw remembers the offset between the original and that first copy and repeats it automatically. A row of evenly spaced bolts or labels becomes a few keystrokes instead of manual placement.
- Orthogonality (Shift key). Hold Shift while drawing with the rectangle tool for a perfect square, or with the oval tool for a perfect circle.
Why It’s Worth Knowing: You don’t have to be a keyboard-shortcut person to benefit from a few of the right ones. These five remove the small frictions of zooming, pasting, duplicating, squaring up a shape that otherwise interrupt the actual work of drawing. The Command-D repeat-offset trick alone turns a repetitive layout task into something close to automatic.
Watch: https://youtu.be/LDMImEVk9os
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This post is part of our ongoing Canvas X Draw How-To video series and if there’s a feature or workflow you’d like to see covered next, let us know.