Zoom out centered on cursor

Feature requests
1

zooming in centers on the cursor. but zooming out is done in a weird way, I understand that this is by design, but it would be nice to add the option for zooming out to be centered on the mouse cursor.

3 Likes
2

I agree. I also read that it was by design but I would be interested to know what problem it solves in the current style. It seems very unintuitive to me the way it currently works.

1 Like
3

For me personally, it is a bit clunky to use the current implementation. I am finding myself constantly readjusting or recentering the canvas, because zooming out shifts it away from the area I was checking.

I also don’t understand what problem it solves.

If I look at my use cases, the majority of the time when I zoom out, it’s not to check an entirely different area of the canvas, I usually do it to check nearby cards and notes, but zooming out shifts the canvas slightly so I find myself readjusting it very often.

4

Zooming with the mouse wheel is such a welcome change! Thanks for that.

I agree that the current difference between zooming in and zooming out can be problematic. When you progressively zoom in and out without moving the mouse (which is, for me at least, a common thing to do) the viewport kind of walks away from you.

In applications I have worked on (notably SketchUp and the companion page layout application LayOut) we experimented with this a bunch. In the end, we settled on an implementation where both zooming in and zooming out are centered on the mouse. Not the center of the screen. Users can get lost in space (zooming to an empty screen, then losing their bearings) in either case. But they seem to do it less often when the intentional center stays where the mouse is pointed.

Maybe, as a feature request, you might want to add a “Zoom to Extents” command that returns the viewport to something that lets the user reorient themselves quickly.

thanks! Loving all of this!

1 Like
5

You might have read that it was “by design” in the brief comment in this bug report: Canvas zoom out reposition issue

I agree that centering on the cursor for both zoom directions would be the ideal design, especially since (1) that’s what the user likely expects when zooming in is cursor-centric and (2) that seems to be standard in other spatial-context zoom scenarios (e.g., Google Maps, Bing Maps, Apple Maps).

Upvoted.

1 Like