Canvas & Navigation
Selecting & moving elements
Selection is the grammar of the canvas: almost everything starts with “select, then act”. Here are all the ways in.
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The basics
- Click an element to select it; drag it to move.
- Shift+click adds or removes elements from the selection.
- Marquee: drag on empty canvas to sweep a selection box over several elements (Shift+marquee adds to what you have). Lines and arrows are only caught when the box actually crosses them — no accidental hitchhikers.
- Cmd/Ctrl+A selects everything on the current canvas.
- Esc clears the selection.
Moving and resizing
Drag to move — with alignment guides helping you line things up. Grab a corner to resize; multi-selections scale together, proportionally, like one big element. Hold Shift while resizing a single element to keep its aspect ratio.
Drop a selection onto a folder to move it inside.
On touch: pick up first, then move
On iPhone and iPad, dragging an unselected element pans the canvas instead of moving the element. Tap once to select — “pick it up” — then drag to move. This one deliberate rule is why you’ll never scroll your layout apart by accident.
Selected — now what?
The floating bar next to a selection carries the actions for it (color, group, lock, duplicate, delete…), and the right-click / long-press menu has the rest: cut, copy, paste, bring to front, send to back. Full lists in the interface tour.
Working at high zoom makes fine positioning easy — but honestly, with snapping you’ll rarely place anything by half-pixels.