Selecting and moving

Click, band, drag

Press V, or click the arrow at the top of the rail. Click an object and it is selected, with a bounding box around it. Drag a band across empty canvas and what the band covers is selected. Click empty canvas and the selection clears.

That bounding box is not a highlight, it is the handle set. Drag inside it to move the selection. Drag a corner to scale, and hold Shift while you drag to keep the proportions. Rotate and skew live on the same box. This is why Free Transform, over in the transform group, mounts the Select tool instead of bringing an engine of its own: the box already was the free transform widget.

Adding, removing, reaching underneath

Shift+click toggles the object under the cursor in or out of the selection and leaves everything else alone. Shift+clicking empty canvas is deliberately harmless, your selection survives it. Shift works with the band too: hold it while you drag and the band toggles what it covers against what you already had.

Alt+click is more useful than it sounds. It selects behind. The first Alt+click picks the object just under the top one, the next goes a step deeper, and it wraps back to the top when it runs out. Learn this one and you will stop opening the Layers panel every time something hides under something else.

For selection by appearance rather than position, the Magic Wand (Y) clicks one object and selects every other object that looks like it, judging fill, stroke, stroke width and opacity each within its own tolerance. Locked and hidden objects are skipped. The Lasso (Q) drags a freeform loop and selects every object whose centre falls inside it.

Moving, nudging and duplicating

Dragging is obvious. The arrow keys are the part people miss for months.

The nudge distance is a preference, not a law. It lives under behaviour in Preferences with the undo limit and the duplicate offset.

To duplicate, hold Alt and drag the selection. Rayzia leaves an exact clone at the original spot and lets the drag carry your selection away: one gesture, one history step, no paste and reposition. Alt+click is still select-behind, because the clone only happens once the drag passes its threshold. A click never clones.

Groups, Escape and Delete

Object ▸ Group binds the selection into one so it moves and transforms as a single thing. Object ▸ Ungroup takes it apart and leaves the pieces selected, so you can act on them straight away instead of re-selecting what you just released.

Escape is context-sensitive, and it repays learning properly. With the Select tool it clears the selection, and a quick second press steps back out a level. Mid-path in a draw tool, it cancels the path you are drawing and leaves you in the tool, so you can start the shape again without re-picking anything. In the node editor it exits node editing, and a rapid second Escape hands you back to the Select tool.

Delete removes the selection. On a path, mind the difference between Delete and the Delete Anchor Point tool in the pen group: Delete breaks the path, while the tool removes an anchor and re-joins the two neighbouring segments into one, leaving no gap.

Drawing Modes

Three small buttons in the rail decide where new art lands relative to your selection. They are not tools and they draw nothing themselves. Shift+D cycles them.

• Draw Normal, the default: new art goes on top.
• Draw Behind: new art goes under the selection, or under the layer if nothing is selected.
• Draw Inside: new art is clipped into the selected shape. Select exactly one object first.

Draw Inside quietly solves a job most people reach for a mask to do. Select a shape, switch to Inside, then draw: whatever you draw is clipped to that shape, and you never build a clip path by hand. Switch back to Normal afterwards, or you will wonder why your next rectangle vanished.

Common questions