Gestures
Every finger and Apple Pencil gesture — orbit, pan, dolly, undo, redo, the Pencil double-tap, draw-and-hold — plus stroke snapping and the gizmos.
Reference
- Gesture
- Two-finger drag · Three-finger drag · Pinch · Two-finger tap · Three-finger tap · Pencil double-tap · Draw and hold
The pen draws and the fingers move the camera. Every navigation gesture on this page accepts direct touches only — a finger, never the Pencil — so the Pencil is free to mark at all times and never has to be put down to orbit, pan or undo.
Two consequences follow from that split, and they are absolute:
Two or more fingers on the screen means navigation, never drawing. A second finger arriving mid-gesture cancels a finger-drawn stroke and hands the touches to the camera.
A Pencil stroke is never interrupted by a resting finger. The cancellation above applies only when the active touch is not the Pencil, so a hand resting on the glass cannot break a stroke in progress.
Canvas gestures
Orbits the viewport camera. A command-bar toggle switches this to pan.
Pans the viewport camera. Three fingers pan regardless of the toggle's setting.
Dollies the viewport camera in and out.
Undo.
Redo.
Performs the action set in iOS Settings ▸ Apple Pencil — by default, toggles between Draw and Eraser.
QuickShape. After the hold threshold — 0.4 seconds by default — the stroke is replaced by the fitted shape.
Orbit, pan and dolly
A two-finger drag orbits by default. A full-width drag turns the scene half a revolution, so the whole scene is reachable in two gestures.
The drag is measured against the canvas rather than the screen. When docked panels shrink the canvas the scene is drawn smaller, and a finger travelling a given distance still moves the camera the same amount — orbiting does not speed up as you open panels.
On the command bar, and in the focus-mode toolbar. Sets what two fingers do.
Orbit turns the camera around the scene. Pan slides it. Three fingers pan under either setting, so pan is always available without changing the toggle.
Pan and pinch track together: a two-finger drag that is also a pinch is one continuous camera move, not two gestures competing.
Rotation lock
A button in the top-right corner of the canvas locks the view's rotation. With it on, two fingers pan and zoom and never turn the view. It lights up in the accent colour and its icon becomes a padlock while locked.
It lives on the canvas rather than in a panel deliberately: it is a control you reach for in the middle of drawing, and hunting through a dock for it would defeat the purpose.
In a 2D shot
A 2D shot has nothing to orbit around, so the gestures are the flat-canvas set:
Pans the canvas. There is no orbit, and no orbit/pan picker on the command bar.
Zooms.
Rotates the canvas, the way you would turn a sheet of paper. Twisting clockwise turns the picture clockwise.
The rotation-lock button holds the canvas square, and shows a flat rotation icon rather than the 3D one. View ▸ Camera ▸ Reset Zoom & Rotation puts it back.
Through the shot camera
While View ▸ Shot Camera is on, finger gestures reposition the frame rather than the camera or the scene — the equivalent of inspecting a photograph. A two- or three-finger drag slides the frame; a pinch magnifies the preview. Neither moves the shot camera. Move the camera itself with the Transform tool.
Undo and redo
The two-finger tap undoes and the three-finger tap redoes, driving the same stroke stack as Edit ▸ Undo and the command bar's arrows.
Both taps defer to camera manipulation. Each one requires the pan, the pinch and a two-finger hold to fail before it fires, so any movement, any zoom and any hold cancels it. A tap registers only as a genuine quick tap with no travel — panning the canvas never fires undo by accident. The two-finger hold that guards them is a 0.2-second recognizer that does nothing itself; it exists purely so that a deliberate rest is not read as a tap.
In effects mode the canvas is read-only and both taps are inert. Orbit, pan and pinch stay live, so the artwork can still be inspected from any angle while an effect is open.
Apple Pencil double-tap
Alekhya does not define its own double-tap action. It reads the one you set in iOS Settings ▸ Apple Pencil and maps it onto the canvas:
| System setting | What Alekhya does |
|---|---|
| Off | Nothing. Turning the gesture off in Settings turns it off here. |
| Switch to Previous Tool | Switches back to the tool used before this one. |
| Any other setting | Toggles between Draw and the Eraser. |
Reading the system setting is the difference between honouring "off" and swapping the tool anyway. A Pencil with no double-tap hardware reports the gesture as off, and is treated the same way.
Draw and hold
Draw a stroke freehand, keep the pen down, and hold it still. After the threshold elapses, the stroke is replaced by the fitted shape and a light haptic fires. If the stroke is not shape-like the stroke is left exactly as drawn — no snap, no chip, no interruption.
Movement of more than 9 points from where the hold began restarts the clock: the pen is travelling, not holding. The tolerance exists because the Pencil reports coalesced movement on essentially every frame from force jitter alone, even parked on glass.
Tool Options ▸ Smart Shape. The master switch. Off, a held stroke is just a held stroke.
Tool Options ▸ Smart Shape. How long the pen must be still before the shape is fitted. Displayed to two decimal places.
The full interaction — steering, the handles, the chip, and what undo does — is documented under QuickShape.
Snap to strokes
When Free 3D drawing is on, strokes land on a plane facing the camera. Snap to strokes is how a new stroke gets onto the same plane as an existing one instead.
The snap happens when the stroke ends — on lift, once, and not before. Nothing snaps while the pen is down.
What the snap does is precise: the stroke's start point does not move. The plane is tilted so that it passes through the start where you already put it and through the snapped end, and the stroke is then rebuilt by replaying the path you drew on screen onto that tilted plane. The result is your line, from where you began it, lying on a plane that reaches the stroke you finished near.
When several strokes are in range, the one nearest your pen on screen wins — screen distance, not world distance, which is what makes the choice match what you are looking at.
The panel hint overstates this
The Free 3D section's hint says the whole stroke moves onto the other stroke's plane, live as you draw. It does not. The start stays where you drew it, the plane tilts, and nothing happens until you lift.
Tool Options ▸ Free 3D, on the Draw tool. Off, a free-3D stroke keeps the camera-facing plane it started on.
Tool Options ▸ Free 3D. How near the stroke's end must finish to an existing stroke for the snap to take. Shown only when Snap to strokes is on.
Transform gizmos
The Transform tool puts a 3D gizmo on whatever it is targeting — the drawing grid, the layer, a selection, a scene object, or the shot camera. The gizmo is dragged directly, in the view you are already in.
Three arms: X is red, Y is green, Z is blue. Dragging one constrains the move or the rotation to that axis.
Free movement in the screen plane. It translates only — there is no free rotate or free scale from the centre.
Tool Options ▸ Transform. Move and Rotate are always offered. Scale appears only when the target is an Object.
Tool Options ▸ Transform. Global aligns the gizmo to the world; Local aligns it to the target's own rotation.
A touch is offered to the gizmo in a fixed order: an anchor-point grab first, within 34 points; then a motion-path keyframe; then a 2D layer's drag-anywhere move; then the gizmo handles. A touch that hits none of them falls through to the camera gestures, so an empty tap or drag still navigates.
With the Select tool and a selection active, a touch that lands on a gizmo handle drives the gizmo rather than starting a new marquee.