The tools

The toolbar runs down the left of the window. Each slot holds one tool or a group of related ones; press and hold a slot to open its flyout and pick another tool from the group. A tool's shortcut is a single key press, and it works whenever you are not typing into text or a field.

The shortcuts below are written in the macOS form. On Windows, read ⌥ as Alt, ⌘ as Ctrl and ⇧ as Shift.

Three habits apply to nearly every tool:

• Hold the space bar to borrow the Hand tool, and let go to return to what you were using.
• Hold ⌘ to borrow the Selection tool in the same way. The Free Transform tool is the exception: it reads ⌘ itself.
• Esc abandons a drag or a path you are part way through drawing, leaving the artwork as it was.

A few slots are listed for completeness but have no behaviour behind them yet. The toolbar marks those as coming soon and the engine refuses them.

Selection

With an object selected, the bounding box carries eight handles. Drag a handle to scale, holding ⇧ to keep the proportions and ⌥ to scale about the centre; drag just outside a corner to rotate, with ⇧ snapping to 45°. Double-click steps into a group and works inside it, double-click text to edit it, double-click a symbol instance to edit the symbol every instance draws, and double-click away from the artwork to step back out.

Live shapes carry their own widgets: drag a corner widget to round every corner of the shape at once, or ⌥-click it to step the corner on to the next kind.

Direct Selection and Group Selection

The Direct Selection tool also drags the crossings of an envelope's mesh, bending what the envelope holds, and it rounds one corner of a live shape at a time rather than all of them.

Magic Wand

Lasso

The pen family

While the Pen tool has a path on the go, Enter or Esc finishes it and Backspace takes back the last anchor.

Curvature

Type

The side knobs of the Touch Type box stretch the character one way only: across for width, along for height.

Lines, arcs, spirals and grids

The two grid tools make one path per line, so every line stays selectable on its own.

Rectangles, ellipses and other shapes

A click rather than a drag with any of these tools opens a dialog, so you can give the shape exact measurements instead. The Flare tool answers a click with a flare the size its options ask for.

Brushes

[ and ] make the brush smaller and larger.

Pencil and the path menders

[ and ] resize the Smooth, Path Eraser and Join brushes. With artwork selected these three work on the selection alone; with nothing selected they work on any path they reach.

Erasing and cutting

Rotate and Reflect

Both tools start from the middle of the selection, and choosing something else puts the reference point back there.

Scale, Shear and Reshape

With individual anchors selected, these tools transform those anchors rather than whole objects.

Width and the liquify brushes

All seven liquify brushes take [ and ] for size, and ⇧ with those same keys - { and } - for how hard they push.

Free Transform and Puppet Warp

Free Transform scales and turns about its reference point, which you can drag anywhere, even outside the box; drop it near one of the box's nine usual places and it settles there. While scaling, ⇧ keeps the proportions and ⌥ scales about the centre rather than the reference point; while turning, ⇧ snaps to 45°. On a corner handle, ⌘ distorts that corner on its own and ⌘⌥⇧ distorts in perspective, with the neighbouring corner mirroring the drag; the widget beside the box sets the same two modes and the constrain switch. Changing a modifier part way through a drag switches at once, without letting go.

Puppet Warp reads Delete as removing the selected pins rather than the artwork, and ⌘A as selecting every pin. Each drag is one step to undo, and undo brings the pins back with the artwork they went with. Type, images and symbol instances cannot be distorted, and are left as they are.

Shape Builder and Live Paint

Perspective

While the grid is showing, the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse and Rectangular Grid tools draw onto the active plane rather than flat, and 1 to 4 pick the plane from those tools too.

Mesh

Gradient

On the annotator, drag a stop along the axis to move it, drag a diamond to shift the blend between two stops, click the axis to add a stop in the colour it already is there, and pull a stop well off the axis to throw it away, as long as two are left. Delete removes the stop you last touched. On a freeform gradient the tool works in colour points instead: click the artwork to add one in the fill colour, and drag a point to move it.

Eyedropper and Measure

Morph

The symbolism brushes

All eight take [ and ] for brush size and { and } for how hard the brush works. They act on the instances in the selection, or on every editable instance when nothing is selected.

The graph tools

While you drag out any of them, ⌥ draws from the centre and ⇧ keeps the box square.

Boards

Delete removes the active board, as long as one is left.

Slices

Moving the view

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