Keyboard shortcuts

The shortcuts below are written in the macOS form. On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl and ⌥ as Alt; ⇧ is Shift on every platform. Scissor shows whichever form matches the machine you are working on, so the menus on a Windows computer read Ctrl+S where this page reads ⌘S.

Shortcuts are matched by the physical position of the key rather than by the character it produces, so an AZERTY or Dvorak layout uses the same keys as a QWERTY one. Most shortcuts do nothing until a document is open; a handful - creating and opening documents, Preferences, the appearance settings and the Help items - work with no document on screen.

Menu items that are listed in Scissor but not yet working are shown greyed out and are left out of this reference, along with the shortcuts printed beside them.

File

Edit

Cut, copy and paste are left to the browser rather than caught by Scissor, so that the system clipboard behaves as it does everywhere else. Choosing them from the Edit menu does the same thing as pressing the keys.

Object

Type

Select

Effect

The Effect menu carries no keyboard shortcuts. Reach its commands from the menu itself, or type the name of the effect into the search field at the top of the Help menu, which finds commands across every menu.

View

Window

Each of these brings its panel to the front, and ticks in the menu while the panel's group is on screen. Panels without a shortcut - Actions, 3D and Materials, Boards, Asset Export, Document Info, Navigator, Properties, Swatches and Variables - open from the Window menu.

Tools

Tool shortcuts are single keys pressed without a modifier, apart from those that take ⇧. They pick the tool straight away, including tools that sit inside a flyout behind another tool in the toolbar. Tools with no shortcut listed here - among them Group Selection, Area Type, Arc, Spiral, Polygon, Star, Smooth, Shear and Measure - are reached by holding the mouse on their toolbar slot and choosing from the flyout.

The Add Anchor Point and Delete Anchor Point shortcuts are the = and - keys on the main row of the keyboard, pressed on their own; the Curve Tool is on the ~ key with ⇧ held.

Fill, stroke and panels

These keys are not on any menu. They act on the fill and stroke swatches at the foot of the toolbar, and on the panels around the canvas.

Whichever of the two swatches is active takes the next colour you choose. X moves the highlight between them, ⇧X exchanges the two colours, and / empties the active one.