Editing and operations

Selection

  • Click for single selection; Shift+click adds and removes objects; Ctrl+click selects an object inside a group without entering it (as in CorelDRAW/Inkscape); Ctrl+A selects everything.
  • A left-to-right marquee takes only objects that fit entirely; right to left — everything the marquee crosses.
  • If both a group and its child end up selected, the selection normalizes to the top level — children are never moved twice.

Groups and entering them

Double-click a group to enter its scope: you edit the group’s children while the rest of the document is dimmed; Esc steps back out one level. Nested groups — another double-click deeper. Arrays and live symmetry have the same scoped editing.

Transforms

  • Moving: Shift constrains the axis; Alt+drag copies (clones are dragged, originals stay); Esc mid-gesture cancels it without a history entry.
  • Resizing: 8 handles on the frame; Shift — proportional, Alt — from the center. A rotated object resizes in its local axes.
  • Rotating: zones just outside the corner handles; Shift snaps to 15° steps, the current angle is shown next to the cursor. Multiple objects rotate around their common center.
  • Corner rounding — directly with handles on the canvas: all four corners of a rectangle (or each one via Ctrl+click), vertices and notches of polygons and stars. Adjacent radii are clamped automatically — the geometry is never invalid.
  • Exact input — the X / Y / W / H spinners (mm), proportion lock, and the angle in the context toolbar.

Align and distribute

The Align panel: left/center/right, top/middle/bottom, centered on both axes; distribution of gaps across three or more objects. The reference is either the selection or the workspace.

Boolean operations

For two or more closed objects, with a live preview:

Operation Keys
Boolean union Ctrl+Shift+U
Boolean subtract Ctrl+Shift+D
Boolean intersect Ctrl+Alt+I
Boolean exclude Ctrl+Shift+X

The result is a compound path with holes preserved. If the shapes do not overlap, the operation honestly reports an empty result and deletes nothing.

Contour offset

An equidistant contour with live preview: distance, direction (Outset / Inset / Both), corner style (miter / round / bevel), and a “keep original” option. An inset that is too large produces a warning, not garbage geometry.

Mirror and live symmetry

  • Mirror — a one-shot reflection, horizontal or vertical, with or without a copy, relative to the selection center or the canvas center.
  • Live symmetry — a dedicated container: draw one half and the mirrored half updates live; contours on the axis can be welded at the axis into a single shape; the symmetry can be broken into independent copies at any time.

Combine and converting to paths

  • Combine (Ctrl+L) — several objects into one compound path: intersections become holes, and it hatches as a single shape. Uncombine (Ctrl+Shift+L) — back into separate contours.
  • Convert to Path — primitives become Bézier paths; text and barcodes become compound paths of glyphs and modules (letter holes preserved). After conversion text is no longer text, but it can be edited by nodes.
  • Ungroup (Ctrl+U) on text — Break Apart into characters, each one still editable text.

Image tracing

Turns a raster image into vector paths (a clean-room implementation of the Potrace algorithm): a threshold with automatic adaptive binarization on uneven scans, a noise filter, smoothing, node count optimization, tracing the full image or a lasso area. Live preview with contour overlay and statistics; the result is compound paths that hatch like any vector.

Undo history and the clipboard

  • Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z — undo/redo; 100 steps deep, a separate history per document tab. All operations are covered; bursts of spinner edits merge into one entry.
  • Undo History (Ctrl+H) — a list of steps with document state thumbnails: click to preview any step, Commit locks in the chosen state, closing without Commit changes nothing.
  • Clipboard: Ctrl+X/C/V with all properties (pen, hatching, transforms); an image from the system clipboard pastes as a bitmap object. The object clipboard works across tabs but not across applications.
  • Command palette (Ctrl+K) — fuzzy search over every command with hotkey hints and a recently-used block.

Limitations

  • Boolean operations, offset, and Combine require closed contours.
  • Locked objects cannot be selected or transformed; hidden objects are not marked.
  • Undo history is not saved to the file — autosave protects the content, not the history.