Canvas: alternative, more fluid, hotkeys

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

The current hotkeys force to press and hold: Space, Ctrl, Shift buttons, which is inconvenient during long work.

Proposed solution

I propose alternative hotkeys:

  1. Mouse wheel scroll: distance.
  2. Mouse wheel button or right mouse button: free movements.
  3. Pressing and holding right mouse button + mouse wheel: vertical movements.
  4. Space or Tab: zoom to selection. If there is no selection - zoom to mouse location.
  5. Create notes via double click: Ctrl + double click.
5 Likes
2

One more keystroke - return to previous scale and place. With Ctrl - centered zoom out.

3

I was just thinking that is how the shortcuts should be.

Having to hold shift, ctrl and space for simple navigation like zooming and panning feels really cumbersome to use. This is especially important on desktop with mouse+keyboard.

I’m glad middle-click drag and right-click drag already work for panning. Those feel very natural and immediately discoverable compared to having to press extra keys.

To add, I think click-dragging an arrow to an empty spot should create a new card by default. Creating a new card shouldn’t require too many clicks.

But right-click dragging to an empty spot should show the context menu when you release it, and it lets you choose what to create at the end of the arrow, like left-click-drag currently does.

4

Yes, any key combinations are terribly tedious in reiterative and simple tasks. Space, tab, ~, 3 mouse buttons, 1-9 (camera zooms to checkpoints) more than enough for fast and comfortable work. Especially when there are 2 modes: viewing and editing.

5

This would be a very helpful feature! Just adding to the discussion of the hotkeys that I think would be helpful:

  1. Navigation between different cards using arrow keys
  2. On pressing Enter on a selected card, enters into edit mode
  3. Pressing Esc, puts us back into navigation mode

This is very similar to the navigation modes present in jupyter / jupyterlab notebooks

Additionally, I noticed that when switching to a different window and editing a note and returning to the Obsidian window containing the canvas, the cursor does not resume from its last position. The focus is not on the card that was being edited previously.