The tools

The toolbar runs down the left of the window and holds every drawing, editing and viewing tool. Each slot is a single tool or a group of related ones; this page lists them all, in the order they sit in the toolbar, with the key that picks each one and what it is for.

Press and hold a slot, or right-click it, to open its flyout and choose 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.

Two slots (the Reshape and Print Tiling tools) are listed for completeness but have no behaviour behind them yet. The toolbar marks those as coming soon and the engine turns them down.

Selection tools

These four pick out what you want to work on next. Reach for the Selection tool for whole objects, the Direct Selection tool for the anchors and segments inside a path, the Auto-Select to gather up everything painted alike, and the Lasso to sweep up a cluster of anchors by hand.

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.

Editable 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. This is the tool you will spend the most time in, so it is worth learning its handles well.

Direct Selection and Group Selection

Use the Direct Selection tool to fine-tune a shape after it is drawn: nudge one anchor, pull a single handle, or reshape a curve. It 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. The Group Selection tool is the quick way to reach an object buried inside nested groups without stepping in and out of them.

Auto-Select

Reach for this when you want to change every shape of one colour at once: click a red one, then recolour the whole selection in a single step.

Lasso

Use it when the anchors you want do not sit in a tidy rectangle, so a marquee would catch too much or too little.

This slot also holds the pixel-selection tools — the Rectangular Marquee, Elliptical Marquee and Lasso Marquee — which draw a marching-ants selection on a pixel layer rather than picking vector anchors. They are covered on the Pixel layers page.

The pen, curvature and type

The tools that lay down new paths and text. The pen family gives you exact control over every anchor and handle, the Curvature tool fits a smooth line through points you drop, and the Type tools set point, area, path and vertical text.

The pen family

The Pen tool is the workhorse for precise drawing, from a logo outline to a lettering path. While it has a path on the go, Enter or Esc finishes it and Backspace takes back the last anchor. The three helpers add, remove and convert anchors on a finished path; the pen and pencil are covered in more depth on the Paths page.

Curvature

Reach for the Curvature tool when you want a flowing line and would rather place points and let Scissor work out the handles than pull each one yourself.

Type

The Type tool alone covers most work: click for a heading, drag a box for a paragraph. The side knobs of the Glyph Edit box stretch the character one way only, across for width and along for height, so you can pull individual letters around for a title without breaking them out of the text. Text is covered in full on the Type page.

Lines and shapes

Everything that draws a ready-made form: straight lines, arcs and spirals, grids of lines, and the rectangles, ellipses, polygons and stars you build a drawing from.

Lines, arcs, spirals and grids

The two grid tools make one path per line, so every line stays selectable on its own: use the Rectangular Grid for tables, calendars and layout scaffolds, and the Polar Grid for dartboards, radar charts and clock faces. They draw grid artwork you keep. That is a different thing from the board's background grid, the on-screen drawing aid you switch on with View › Grid › Show Grid, which never prints and comes in seven kinds (square, isometric, hexagonal, oblique, golden ratio, pattern and perspective). The background grids are covered on the Grids page. A separate Grid Shape Tool (⇧G) builds a filled path by clicking or dragging across the cells of that background grid — a quick way to lay solid blocks onto an isometric or hexagonal grid.

Rectangles, ellipses and other shapes

These make live shapes: they keep their parameters, so you can change a rectangle's size or a star's point count long after drawing it. A click rather than a drag with any of them 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, pencil and erasers

The freehand tools. Paint a stroke that follows the pointer, sketch a rough path and let Scissor tidy it, tend and mend existing paths, or rub artwork away. Two slots here also reach the raster side of a document: the Brush paints pixels and the Pixel Eraser clears them.

Brushes

Use the Paintbrush for expressive, calligraphic strokes that stay editable, and the Fill Brush when you would rather build up a solid filled shape than a stroked line. [ and ] make the brush smaller and larger. The Brush Tool shares this slot but paints pixels rather than a path, for shading and texture, and the Paint Bucket shares it too, flooding a connected area of a pixel layer with the fill colour. Painting on pixel layers is covered on the Pixel layers page.

Pencil and the path menders

The Pencil is the quick way to sketch a shape by hand; the Shaper is for when you want a rough gesture read as a clean rectangle, ellipse or line. The last three tend existing paths: [ 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

The Eraser carves shapes out of filled artwork like rubbing out pencil; the Scissors makes a single clean cut at a point; the Knife slices whole objects into pieces along the line you drag. The Pixel Eraser shares the Eraser's slot but belongs to the raster side, on the Pixel layers page.

One more toolbar slot is entirely raster: the Dodge, Burn and Sponge retouch brushes lighten, darken and saturate the pixels already on a layer. They paint like the Brush and are covered, with the rest of pixel editing, on the Pixel layers page.

Transforming

The tools that move, turn, mirror, scale, slant, distort and reshape what is already drawn. Each transform tool works about a reference point, which starts at the middle of the selection; ⌥-clicking sets that point where you click and opens the tool's dialog for exact values. With individual anchors selected, these tools transform those anchors rather than whole objects.

Rotate and Reflect

Reach for the Rotate tool to turn artwork about a chosen pivot rather than its own centre, and the Reflect tool to build a symmetrical drawing: mirror a copy across a chosen axis and the two halves stay matched. Both tools start from the middle of the selection, and choosing something else puts the reference point back there.

Scale, Shear and Reshape

Use the Scale tool when you want to size artwork about a fixed point rather than a bounding-box handle, and the Shear tool to slant a shape for a cast shadow or an italic feel.

Width and the liquify brushes

The Width tool tapers and swells a stroke by hand, for a nib-like or brush-like line without switching brushes. The seven liquify brushes push, twist and roughen paths as you paint over them, for organic distortion that would be slow to do anchor by anchor. All seven take [ and ] for size, and ⇧ with those same keys, { and }, for how hard they push.

Free Transform and Pin Warp

Free Transform is the all-in-one box when you want to scale, turn and shear in one gesture rather than switching tools. It works 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.

Pin Warp is for posing and bending a single piece of artwork, like flexing a drawn arm, by pinning the parts that should hold still and dragging the rest. It 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.

Merge & Split, Region Fill and perspective

Tools that treat overlapping shapes as regions to combine and colour, and the grid that lets you draw and place artwork in perspective.

Merge & Split and Region Fill

Use the Merge & Split to draw a few overlapping shapes and then merge and trim them into the outline you want, by dragging across the pieces. Region Fill treats a set of overlapping paths as a colouring book: the Bucket floods each enclosed face with a colour, and the Selection tool picks faces and edges so you can restyle them, without first cutting the shapes apart.

Perspective

Reach for these to draw scenes and lettering that recede towards vanishing points, such as a street or a boxed product. 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 and gradient

The two tools for painting graduated colour into a shape: a mesh of colour points across the object, or a smooth blend along an axis.

Mesh

Use a mesh for soft, freeform shading that a straight gradient cannot give, such as the rounded highlight on a piece of fruit or a face.

Gradient

Drag the Gradient tool to point a linear or radial blend the way you want and to set how far it runs. 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. Gradients are covered further on the Colour & appearance page.

Sampling, measuring and morphing

Copy an appearance from one object to another, read distances and angles off the canvas, and blend between shapes in a run of steps.

Eyedropper and Measure

The Eyedropper is the fast way to make one object match another: pick the look you like and it lands on the selection. Use the Measure tool to check a gap or an angle without leaving a mark on the artwork.

Morph

Reach for the Morph tool to blend one shape or colour into another across even steps, whether for a smooth shaded band or evenly spaced, changing copies along a path.

Symbols

A symbol is a piece of artwork you can place many times, with every copy tied to one master. The symbolism brushes lay down and then work whole crowds of these instances at once.

The symbolism brushes

Use these to scatter and then vary a field of repeated artwork, such as trees across a hillside or stars in a sky: spray a set, then thin it, resize it, spin it and tint it so the copies do not look stamped. 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.

Boards and slices

The tools that set out the canvas for output: artboards, which are the pages your artwork sits on, and slices, which mark rectangles to export on their own.

Boards

Reach for the Board tool to add pages for different sizes or versions of a design in one document, and to resize a page around what you have drawn. Delete removes the active board, as long as one is left.

Slices

Use slices to carve one artboard into pieces that export separately, such as the buttons and banners of a web layout, each as its own file. Exporting is covered on the Open & export page.

Moving around

The tools that pan, turn and zoom the view. None of them change the document: they only change how you are looking at it.

Moving the view

The Hand tool scrolls a zoomed-in drawing without touching the scrollbars, and the Rotate View tool tilts the whole view so you can draw a slanted line at a comfortable angle, then set it straight again.

Zoom

Fill and stroke controls

At the foot of the toolbar sit the fill and stroke swatches, one in front of the other. The front swatch is the active side, the one your next colour choice lands on. A handful of single keys work them without reaching for the panels:

These make the common moves quick: X to jump between painting the fill and the stroke, / to drop the fill or the stroke to none, and D to get back to a plain black-and-white start. Fills, strokes and how they are set are covered on the Colour & appearance page.