Keyboard Shortcuts

Filament expects you to use the keyboard. Reaching for a menu mid-show is a tax, so anything you do more than twice has a key.

The in-app reference is the fastest way to find one: Cmd/Ctrl + /, or Help → Keyboard Shortcuts. It's searchable, grouped the same way this page is, and — this matters — it's honest. Every entry in that dialog does something. If you find one that doesn't, it's a bug worth reporting.

How scoping works

Almost every key is scoped — it belongs to a place. S splits a clip on the Timeline and does nothing on the Canvas. ← nudges a DMX address on the Output page, steps clips in the Session grid, and moves selected geometry on the Canvas. Same key, three jobs, no collisions.

Three rules cover it:

• The route decides. Canvas keys fire on the Canvas, Player keys in the Player, and so on.
• Focus wins over route. Once a Surface row or a library tile has focus, the arrow keys belong to that list, not the page behind it.
• Typing beats everything. With a cursor in a text field, letter keys type. The only exceptions are F1–F6, which never produce text.

Menu accelerators (File, View, Window, Help) are the exception — they carry real system accelerators and work from anywhere. Edit menu items route to whichever editor you're in: the Canvas on /canvas, the Timeline or the Session grid on /player. On a page with no editor — Settings, Library, Output — they simply do nothing. They will never yank you to another page to run an action you didn't ask for.

Everywhere

The command palette is worth building a habit around. Type a few letters of what you want — nwp finds New Project — and hit Enter. It matches subsequences, so you don't have to remember whether the menu item says "Export XML…" or "Export to Resolume".

File and navigation

File → Duplicate Project has no key on purpose — Cmd/Ctrl + D is Duplicate Selection, and quietly cloning a project because your fingers were on the wrong page is not a good surprise.

Window

The Window menu also holds Toggle Maximize and the preview windows — Composition Preview, Clip / Layer Preview, and a per-layer Layer Previews submenu. Those open from the menu; no keys.

Canvas

Tools

View

Wheel behavior: plain scroll pans, pinch or Ctrl/Alt + scroll zooms toward the cursor. Panning on plain scroll is deliberate — a stray trackpad gesture shouldn't rescale your stage.

G controls grid visibility only. Snap-to-grid is the separate magnet toggle, and you can suspend it for one drag by holding Cmd/Ctrl.

Editing

Holding an arrow key collapses the whole burst into one undo step, so nudging a strip into place twenty times doesn't cost you twenty Cmd+Zs to get back.

Cmd/Ctrl + A picks up standalone slices only — imported fixtures and matrices. Curve-generated slices are edited through their curve, so in a project drawn entirely from curves it selects nothing. Marquee or use the sidebar instead.

Anchors

With the Draw or Freehand tool active and a curve selected:

A plain handle drag on a smooth anchor keeps its symmetry: the opposite handle mirrors. Alt is what breaks that. This is backwards from some pen tools and right for LED work, where you want smooth by default and a corner only when you ask for one.

Player

These fire while the Player is in front and you aren't typing.

Session grid

Arrow-stepping skips empty cells, clamps at both ends, and never wraps — so holding → walks you to the last clip on that layer and stops there instead of looping back to the top.

Panic crossfades every layer out. It leaves blackout alone and writes no undo entry, because the one time you need it you'll be reaching in the dark.

The Key Map (library drawer → Connections, then the Key Map button) binds bare keys to cells and columns: arm it, click a cell, press a key. Keys the transport already owns are refused — Space, Tab, Esc, F2, ←, →, b, t, [, ], -, =, +.

Parameter controls

Every knob and fader in the Player answers to the same four gestures:

Scroll-to-adjust is off by default, under Settings → General → Parameter controls. Left on, an attempt to scroll a crowded effects panel silently rewrites whatever knob happened to be under the pointer. Turn it on once you know you want it.

Double-clicking an output marker on a modulated fader types its out-min or out-max directly.

Library drawer

Pressing a tab's key while that tab is showing closes the drawer. F1–F6 work even with a cursor in a search box, since they can't type anything.

Double-clicking a tile loads it too — into the selected cell for content, or into the resolved chain (clip → group → layer → master) for an effect.

Timeline (Arrangement)

Tab gets you here. Everything below is scoped to the Arrangement view.

Transport and navigation

Which Space does what is yours to choose — Settings → General → Timeline swaps whether plain Space resumes in place or restarts from the mark you clicked.

View

Clips

Gestures

Output

Arrow keys on /output move DMX addresses, not geometry. With a fixture chain selected:

A nudge that would collide with another fixture, or fall below channel 1, is refused rather than quietly creating a conflict. Each accepted nudge is one undo step.

The Surfaces list

Click a Surface row and the list takes the keyboard:

While a row has focus the arrows stay with the list — they won't also nudge canvas geometry or DMX addresses behind your back.