Canvas Navigation

How you pan and zoom the two zoomable canvases — the Viewer and the Node Graph. Both behave the same so the gestures are muscle-memory across panels. Mouse and trackpad are both first-class.

Gestures

Gesture	Action
Scroll wheel (mouse)	Zoom, centered on the cursor
Pinch (trackpad)	Zoom, centered on the cursor
Two-finger swipe (trackpad)	Pan
Cmd/Ctrl + wheel	Zoom (explicit — works with any input)
Middle-mouse drag	Pan

Zooming is always cursor-centered: the point under the pointer stays put as the canvas scales, so you zoom into what you're looking at rather than the center of the panel.

Mouse vs. trackpad

The editor picks pan vs. zoom automatically — there's no mode toggle:

• A plain mouse scroll wheel always zooms, at a fixed step per notch.
• A trackpad two-finger swipe pans, and a pinch zooms smoothly.
• Holding Cmd/Ctrl while scrolling forces a zoom. This works with any input device, so it's the reliable fallback whenever a gesture doesn't do what you expect.

Touch-surface mice

Some "mice" use a touch surface instead of a notched wheel — the Apple Magic Mouse and free-spin scroll wheels (e.g. some Logitech models). On these, a plain one-finger swipe pans instead of zooms. To zoom, hold Cmd/Ctrl while scrolling.

Zoom limits

Each canvas clamps zoom to its own range:

• Viewer: 5%–400%.
• Node Graph: 25%–300%.

The Viewer also has a Fit mode (scales the comp to the panel); zooming from Fit resolves to a concrete percentage and zooms from there.

Timeline (Keys & Graph)

The timeline's Keys (dope sheet) and Graph (graph editor) canvases follow the same mouse-vs-trackpad split, but the non-zoom gesture scrolls the timeline rather than panning a 2D canvas:

Gesture	Keys (dope sheet)	Graph editor
Two-finger swipe	Slide through time (horizontal) and tracks (vertical)	Slide through time (horizontal) and pan the value axis (vertical)
Pinch	Zoom the time axis	Zoom the time axis
Scroll wheel (mouse)	Zoom the time axis	Zoom the time axis
Alt + wheel	Native scroll	Zoom the value axis

Pinch-zoom on the time axis accumulates smoothly: a continuous pinch eases through the zoom levels rather than jumping, while a mouse wheel still moves exactly one zoom step per notch.

Related

• Timeline Panel — the timeline has its own horizontal (time) zoom; see its zoom shortcuts.
• Keyboard shortcuts — the canvas-navigation gestures are also listed there.