The Canvas

The canvas is where the graph lives. It is effectively infinite; the initial view is centered on the world origin, with a very large amount of headroom in every direction.

Panning and zooming

Zoom range: 10% to 200%. Values outside that are clamped, and any single zoom step is limited to between half and double the current scale.

Mouse wheel zooms, with no modifier. Scrolling never pans on desktop.
Trackpad two-finger scroll pans; Ctrl+two-finger scroll zooms; trackpad pinch zooms.
Middle-button drag pans. Left-drag on empty canvas pans.
On touch, a one-finger drag pans and a two-finger pinch zooms. A two-finger drag does not pan. As soon as a second finger touches down, the in-progress one-finger pan, tap or long-press is abandoned.
Pinch and scroll zoom anchor on the pointer or the pinch focal point. Zoom commands, the toolbar’s Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons and the toolbar zoom field anchor on the center of the viewport.
The toolbar’s Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons step by a factor of 1.25. The zoom field itself accepts 50 to 500 typed, but the canvas still clamps the result to the 10% to 200% range above, so anything over 200 lands at 200%.
Canvas Zoom Sensitivity (Settings → Accessibility, 0.1 to 2.0, default 1.0) multiplies every pinch and scroll step.

Edge auto-pan. While dragging a node, a wire, or a selection marquee, bringing the pointer within 48 points of the viewport edge scrolls the canvas in that direction, up to 800 points per second at full penetration.

The full per-device input tables are in Input Devices.

The grid

A dot grid spaced 24 points apart in world space. It pans and scales with the canvas. The dots fade out as you zoom out: fully visible at 80% zoom and above, fading to nothing between 80% and 70%, invisible at 70% and below. Turn it off entirely with Canvas Grid in Settings → General.

The 3D viewport can also take the grid’s place. Turning on the canvas-background option in the 3D panel paints the live PBR render behind the graph instead of the dots, and pauses the 3D panel’s own viewport while it does. See 3D Preview.

Selection

Click a node to select it, Shift+click to toggle nodes in and out of the selection, and drag a marquee (right-drag on desktop, one-finger long-press on touch) to select a region. Selection, undo and the clipboard are covered in Selection and Undo.

Comments and annotations

Comment boxes are labeled, resizable boxes drawn behind the nodes, and annotations are freehand strokes drawn above everything else. Neither affects what the graph renders. See Comments.

The minimap (Node Map)

Off when the app starts. Toggle it with the Toggle Minimap button in the toolbar or Ctrl/Cmd+M; the button stays lit while it is visible. It is not drawn on iPad at all.

It is a 200-point-wide floating panel: a 28-point Node Map title bar above a 150-point map area, anchored near the bottom-right of the canvas.

Every node shows as a dot; the current viewport shows as a stroked rectangle.
Drag the title bar to reposition the panel. The map area itself is never a drag handle.
Tap the map area to open the Jump Node list.
Long-press the title bar for a Close Minimap confirmation: “Hide the canvas minimap? You can show it again from the toolbar or with Ctrl+M.”
Pointer input over the panel does not reach the canvas underneath, so you cannot accidentally pan while using it.

Jump Nodes

Jump Nodes are labeled navigation markers: 120 by 64 points, with a header strip and an accent glow, carrying an editable label (default Jump). They have no ports and take no part in texture evaluation. They move, duplicate and delete like any other node, are renamed through the context menu’s Rename, and are saved with the project.

Place one the same way you place anything else: Jump Node sits in the Canvas category of the node library, alongside Reroute and Comment Box, so it can be dragged in from the Node Picker panel, found through the toolbar search field, or picked from the double-click node picker. They can also be created through the MCP interface.

Being canvas-native rather than registry definitions, the three Canvas entries cannot be tagged, favorited or moved into your own categories the way generator and filter nodes can.

Selecting one from the minimap’s Jump Node list recenters the canvas on it without changing zoom. With none placed, the list reads No Jump Nodes on canvas.

Performance overlay

Turning on Perf Overlay in Settings → General adds an FPS counter in the canvas’s top-right corner and per-node compute times above each node.