Keyboard shortcuts and controls

Keyboard shortcuts & controls

This guide doesn't list keyboard shortcuts — that list already lives in one place, and a copy here would go stale immediately. Instead, this explains how to always pull up the current list, and which control concepts (context menus, dragging, box-select versus panning, zooming) are worth understanding on their own.

What you'll learn here

• How to open the always-current shortcuts overview.
• What each of the four context menus in the Gantt view contains.
• How dragging works: moving a bar versus drawing a relation.
• When a drag on empty canvas pans, and when it box-selects.
• Zooming, document tabs and presentation mode.
• How to restart the tour.

The always-current overview

Press Ctrl+/ (or Cmd+/ on macOS) to open the shortcuts overview — the same window is also reachable via the Shortcuts button on the View ribbon tab. This window is read-only and is built directly from the app's source code: a new shortcut shows up here automatically, with no separate list for anyone to keep in sync. That's exactly why this guide doesn't duplicate the list — a second, hand-maintained list would sooner or later drift from what the app actually does. The window groups shortcuts by category: File, Edit, Structure, View and Navigation.

Context menus: four kinds, depending on where you right-click

Right-clicking in the Gantt view gives a different menu depending on where the mouse is:

• On a task bar — the full task menu (edit, insert, add subtask/milestone/relation, assign calendar, progress, priority, trace path, delete…), plus one extra bar-specific item at the top: Start relation from here.
• On a task row without a bar hit (for example a row with no bar currently visible) — the same task menu, but without the bar-specific item.
• On a group header row (the row that summarizes a grouped set of tasks) — a small menu to collapse/expand that one group, plus Expand all/Collapse all for the whole tree.
• On empty canvas (no task, no group header) — New task, Add milestone, Paste (if there's something on the clipboard), Reset zoom and Fit to project.

This last menu was verified live: right-clicking an empty spot on the Gantt canvas produces exactly these five items, in this order.

Dragging on a task bar

Grabbing and dragging a task bar moves the task (or, when grabbing the edge, changes its duration). Hold Shift while dragging from a bar, and instead you start drawing a relation to whichever task you release on — the same thing as Start relation from here in the bar's context menu, but in one mouse motion.

Panning versus box-select

A drag that starts on empty space does one of two things, and that depends on where you start it and on your scroll mode (Settings → Scroll & zoom):

• In the task table (the left-hand column with WBS/name/duration), a drag on empty space is always a box-select — panning never happens there.
• In the Gantt canvas itself: if your scroll mode is set to Drag (map-style panning), panning wins — exactly as you'd expect from a map application. On either of the other scroll modes (Position or Modifier mapping), that same drag on empty canvas is a box-select, letting you select multiple tasks at once by dragging a rectangle around them.

In short: the task table always selects; the canvas only pans in drag scroll mode and selects otherwise.

Zooming

Besides the zoom buttons on the ribbon, +/= (or Ctrl+=) zooms in and - (or Ctrl+-) zooms out. A bare 0 resets zoom to the default; Ctrl+0 adjusts zoom so the whole project fits on screen ("fit to project") — the same as the button with that name in the empty-canvas context menu above.

Document tabs

If you have several projects open at once (each in its own document tab), Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 jump straight to the first through ninth document tab.

Presentation mode

F11 toggles presentation mode — a full-screen view without the ribbon and side panels, meant for showing the schedule without the editing chrome around it. Esc exits presentation mode again (and, on a subsequent press, performs the usual "clear selection").

Restarting the tour

Want to run the introduction tour again (for example to show someone else the app)? There are two places to do that: the Tour button on the View ribbon tab, or Start tour in the Backstage navigation (the row just above Settings). Both start the tour immediately, without showing the welcome dialog first.

Further reading

• Open the shortcuts overview itself with Ctrl+/ — that's the binding source, not this guide.
• Scroll and zoom behaviour is configured under Settings → Scroll & zoom, available in all three of the app's fixed settings locations (the gear icon, the Settings ribbon tab, and Backstage → Settings).