Selecting and editing#

At a glance#

• Fill and stroke — with the Select tool active and something selected, clicking a Quick Access Color paints the selection with whichever of fill and stroke is in front (Fill and stroke): with the stroke, every outline and text takes it; with the fill (X puts it in front), every closed shape is filled with it and open lines keep what they have. The color picker in the fill and stroke control does the same: the selection follows it as it is dragged, and the whole drag undoes as one step. Shift + X swaps each selected shape's fill and outline. Fills are honored by the canvas, thumbnails, and SVG/PDF export.
• Stroke width on a selection - with the Select tool active and something selected, the Width slider widens or narrows the selected outlines as it moves, and the whole drag undoes as one step. A width typed with Quick Width (W, then a number) does the same. Text and images have no outline and are left alone; with a drawing tool in hand, the slider sets the width of the next mark only.
• Show Selection Borders (Ctrl/Cmd + H) — a switch in the Move and Mirror palettes, beside their live preview, draws or drops the dashed blue outline around the selected elements. They stay selected and still move, copy and export the same way, and the layers panel still shows what is selected; only the outline on the canvas goes, so a drawing can be judged with something selected. On by default, and the same switch appears in both settings views.
• Hold Shift while dragging to pin the movement to the nearest axis or 45-degree diagonal. The direction is taken from the pointer's own travel since the drag began and re-chosen as it moves, so swinging around the start point swaps the drag onto the line it now points down; the movement is projected onto that line, so the thing being dragged keeps up with the pointer instead of lagging at its perpendicular foot. Letting Shift go hands the drag straight back to the pointer. It applies to moving a selection (and so to the Alt-drag copy), to Direct Select and Vector Path drags of an anchor, a handle, or a whole path, and to the Space + drag pan. Drags where Shift already means something else keep that meaning: the rubber-band marquee (Shift adds to the selection), drawing (Shift snaps to an endpoint), the quick curve (Shift swings the apex), and the shape tools.
• Shift-click still toggles selection membership — but on an element that is already selected the removal now waits for the release, so the same press can start a Shift-constrained drag instead. A Shift-press that never moves is still a Shift-click.
• A press inside a selection belongs to the selection. Hit-testing is forgiving by design — every mark is widened by a few screen pixels so a thin line can be clicked at all — and that forgiveness used to outrank the selection: pressing in the middle of several selected elements would land on whatever unselected mark happened to be nearby, replace the whole selection with it, and drag that one thing instead. The selection now keeps the press, so the drag moves what you were aiming at. The element under the pointer is not lost: release without moving and it is selected, exactly as a click on it always did.
• Undo / redo, clear, custom ink colors, and keyboard shortcuts.

The Select tool#

Select tool: the active tool when napkin-sketch opens. Shows the black arrow pointer. Click a stroke to select and drag it — a filled shape's interior counts as the shape, so clicking its color grabs it, while unfilled outlines stay click-through in the middle; Shift-click to add it to (or remove it from) the current selection; drag over empty space to rubber-band-select multiple strokes at once; Ctrl+A selects everything and Ctrl+Shift+A deselects. Hold Space and drag to pan the canvas. Selecting elements highlights their rows in the Layers panel.

What a click picks#

Changed in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0: a click used to pick the first mark in the page's list within 8 page units of the mark's centre line, a reach that no setting changed and that grew on screen as you zoomed in.

• The mark on top, where its ink is. A click picks the mark whose painted ink is under the pointer, and when marks overlap, the one painted over the others. The order is the canvas's: the Layers panel's stack, so a layer moved up picks on top as it paints on top. A line is as wide as it is painted, pressure included, and so are a Copic's broad nib and a stroke drawn with a Stroke Profile. A dashed line counts as solid, gaps and all. Text and images pick by their boxes.
• Failing that, the nearest. A click beside the ink picks the nearest mark within the Select sensitivity, in screen pixels: 4 unless changed in Verbose Settings > Sketch Support (1 to 20). Screen pixels, so it reaches as far at every zoom.
• Erased ink is gone. The Eraser cuts the marks themselves, so a click where it passed picks nothing. An older file's eraser marks are never picked or boxed either, and a click where one has cut a mark away picks nothing there.
• A rubber band takes what its box meets. Every mark whose ink the box touches joins the selection, a line it only crosses included. A rectangle's edge counts even with none of its corners inside the box. A filled shape also counts when the box sits inside its fill.
• Direct Select picks the same way, at its own reach, the Direct Select sensitivity (8 unless changed, 1 to 20 screen pixels). See Direct Select.
• Direct Select's box picks points, not marks. A drag over empty canvas with Direct Select picks the anchors inside the box, or, when it holds none, the segments it crosses. See Select with a box.

Copy and paste#

• Copy and paste (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V), from the Edit menu, a right-click on the canvas, or the keyboard:
  • Paste lands under the pointer when the pointer is over the canvas, and steps down-right from the copied position when it is not, so a run of pastes stacks visibly instead of piling up in one spot.
  • Paste in Place (Ctrl+Shift+V) puts the elements back at the exact coordinates they were copied from — the way to move a graphic to another page without it drifting. The clipboard belongs to the app, not to a page, so a copy taken on one page pastes onto any other.
  • Duplicate (Ctrl+D) copies and pastes in one step without disturbing the clipboard, and keeps a group's layers the same way a paste does.
  • Alt-drag copies the selection and drags the copy, leaving the original where it was. While Alt is held over a selection - and for as long as the copy is being dragged - the pointer becomes two arrows: the usual one at the hotspot and a second stepped out beside it in the inverse fill, with a node square beside them, so the modifier shows its effect before the drag commits to it.
  • Pasted elements become the selection and the Select tool takes over, so the new copy can be dragged straight away.
  • A copied group keeps its layers, however the group was reached. Clicking its row and rubber-banding its marks are the same gesture: a group joins the copy when every one of its mark-carrying layers is in the copy already. Pasting then rebuilds the tree rather than flattening it - every nested layer comes back with its own name, opacity, visibility, and lock, and the marks keep the paint order they had, so the graphic is identical to the one copied. This holds for Ctrl+V, Ctrl+D, and the Alt-drag copy alike. The copy lands as a sibling of the original, at the same nesting level rather than inside it, and only the pasted root takes a " - Copy" suffix; the layers under it keep the names the source file gave them. Pasted onto another page, where there is no original to sit beside, the tree goes in at the top level.
  • A plain canvas selection still pastes flat, onto one layer, the way any element lands - a few marks picked out with the rubber band are not a structure worth rebuilding.
  • A group row is a fine place to paste onto. Selecting an imported graphic by its group row and pasting a flat clipboard drops a new layer inside that group and carries on, the same way drawing on a group does. Only a genuinely locked or hidden layer refuses, and it says which.
  • The system clipboard comes too: a copy also goes out as SVG, so it can be pasted into Illustrator or Inkscape, and a graphic copied in one of those pastes in here (as layers, through the same importer the File > Import path uses). An in-app copy wins over its own SVG echo; a newer outside copy wins over the in-app one.