Shortcuts and the mouse

The editor works mostly with the mouse. There are a few keys you need often, and a handful of mouse movements that are not obvious.

The keyboard

The coloured keys do something in the editor. The colour says what the key is about: orange is selecting and editing, blue is the view, green is the look and dark blue is saving. A key with a corner in a second colour does two things: one on its own, another with Ctrl held.

A key only works when the attention is not in a field. If you are typing in a name or a note, the key belongs to that field. Escape and Ctrl + S always work, even just after a click in the drawing.

What a few keys do exactly

• Escape stops whatever you are doing. A tool goes off, a line you are drawing is broken off, a shape editor is left. If nothing is running, nothing happens.
• Delete removes what you have selected. That can be track, but also a table's corner, a tree, a road or a note.
• F brings the selection into view, Home the whole layout. The camera keeps looking from the side it was already on, so it does not swing round your layout.
• C switches between the realistic world and the drawing. The four look keys beside it — T, O, L and I — belong to the look you are in at that moment, and every look remembers its own settings.
• Ctrl + S saves the layout. If there is outdated track in it, nothing is saved and you first get the list of pieces that have to be replaced.

The mouse

• Left-click selects. Click beside everything to empty the selection.
• Dragging the right button turns the camera, the scroll wheel zooms. That keeps working while you are using a tool, except during a stroke.
• Double-click a table puts it into shape mode: you get a handle on every corner.
• Double-click a side splits it there, double-click a corner removes it.
• Ctrl held on a side's arrow extrudes that side instead of sliding it. That is how you make a bay on a platform or an arm off a canal.
• Shift while drawing a line makes that point a sharp corner instead of a smooth bend.
• Double-click or Enter finishes a line you are drawing.
• Shift when clicking track selects the whole path between the previous piece and this one; double-click track selects everything joined to it.
• Dragging from the track list puts a piece down where you let go, on the terrain.

What the right mouse button does not do

There is no context menu. Everything you can do with a selected object is on the context tab in the ribbon, which appears the moment you select something.