Drawing & Selecting

Tools

The toolbar floats at the bottom of the canvas. Click a tool, or press its shortcut, then click and drag on the canvas to draw.

| Tool | Shortcut | Draws | | ----------- | ---------- | --------------------------------------------- | | Frame | F or A | An artboard to hold and clip layers | | Rectangle | R | A rectangle | | Oval | O | An ellipse or circle | | Line | L | A straight line | | Vector | V | A custom shape, point by point (the pen tool) | | Text | T | A text layer | | Slice | S | An export region |

Hold Shift while drawing to keep proportions: a square instead of a rectangle, a circle instead of an oval, or a line at a fixed angle.

A Slice doesn't add anything to your design. It marks a rectangular area you can export on its own, so draw one around whatever you want to save out. See Export.

Shaders

The shaders button at the end of the toolbar opens a gallery of generated backgrounds — gradients, waves, noise, metaballs, dithering, and more. Click a tile to drop it onto the canvas as an image you can move, resize, and place behind your other layers.

An inserted shader stays editable. Select it and a small floating toolbar appears next to it — its sliders button opens the Shader settings, where you can recolor it, adjust scale, rotation, and variation, or hit Shuffle for a fresh take — the image on the canvas updates as you go. That settings panel is a floating window: drag it by its top bar to move it anywhere over the canvas, and close it with the ×. (With the inspector open, the same settings appear as a section in the panel instead.)

Selecting

• Click a layer to select it.
• Shift-click or Cmd/Ctrl-click another layer to add it to or remove it from the selection.
• With a group or frame selected, click one of the things inside it to select that instead — each click steps one level deeper. Dragging still moves the whole selection, so you only step in when you click without moving.
• Double-click to drill inside a group or frame and select what's underneath.
• Drag from an empty spot on the canvas to select everything the rectangle touches. Frames are selected as a whole — their contents stay untouched, so sweeping across a row of frames picks up just the frames.
• While dragging a selection rectangle, push the cursor against the edge of the window and the canvas scrolls with you, so you can keep going past what's currently visible.

Moving & resizing

• Drag a selection to move it, or nudge it with the arrow keys: 1px per press, or 10px with Shift+arrow.
• Resize by dragging the corner or edge handles. Hold Shift to keep the proportions while you resize.
• Rotate by dragging just outside a corner handle.

To duplicate, press Cmd/Ctrl D, or hold Alt/Opt and drag the selection to drop a copy where you release.

Arranging

Group and frame your layers, or change their stacking order.

| Action | Shortcut | | ------------------------ | ------------------ | | Group | Cmd/Ctrl G | | Ungroup / dissolve frame | Cmd/Ctrl Shift G | | Wrap in a frame | Cmd/Ctrl Alt G | | Bring forward | ] | | Send backward | [ | | Bring to front | Cmd/Ctrl Alt ] | | Send to back | Cmd/Ctrl Alt [ |

Ungroup also works on a frame: it removes the frame and lifts its contents up to where the frame was, keeping each layer in place. This works whether or not the frame uses auto layout.

Right-click a layer to open its context menu, with duplicate, group, stacking order, lock and hide, mask, delete, and more.

Combining shapes

Select two or more shapes and combine them into a single editable shape — from the boolean operations button in the selection panel (it appears in the right sidebar whenever two or more shapes are selected), the right-click menu, or a shortcut. The result stays editable: adjust the original shapes any time and the combination updates to match.

| Operation | What it does | Shortcut | | --------- | ------------------------------------ | ----------------- | | Union | Merge them into one outline | Opt/Alt Shift U | | Subtract | Cut the top shapes out of the bottom | Opt/Alt Shift S | | Intersect | Keep only the overlapping area | Opt/Alt Shift I | | Exclude | Keep everything except the overlap | Opt/Alt Shift E | | Flatten | Merge the selection into one shape | Opt/Alt Shift F |

Editing vectors & text

• Select a vector and press Enter (or use the Edit path button in the selection panel) to edit its path. Click to add points, and drag points or their handles to shape the curves. Press Enter or Escape when you're done.
• Double-click a text layer (or select it and press Enter) to edit the text. Press Escape to finish.

For the complete list of shortcuts, see Keyboard shortcuts.