Selecting and Navigating
Use the left mouse button to pick geometry and the right one to move the camera. Reach for this article when a click keeps landing on the wrong thing, when the part has vanished off screen, or when a key does something you did not expect. Which tool appears next, and what a feature attaches to, both follow from what you picked.
Moving the camera
Three mouse buttons do three jobs, and the left one is left alone:
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| Right-button drag | Orbit |
| Middle-button drag | Pan |
| Wheel | Zoom |
| Right click (no drag) | Open the radial menu |
| Left button | Never moves the camera — it belongs to selection |
Click versus drag is what lets the right button do two things: turn the model and give you a menu. A quick press and release opens the radial. Anything longer, or with movement, is an orbit.
Zoom in and you stop at a one-centimetre field of view. Zooming out has a limit too, but it sits some four hundred metres wide, far enough that you can scroll until the part is a speck and think you have lost it. Do not hunt for it with the wheel. Press the key that frames everything and it comes back.
The ViewCube
Bottom right sits a small cube that mirrors the camera. Click a face, an edge or a corner and the camera glides to that view. There are 26 of them, so "front", "top-right", and "that corner" are all one click. It appears only in Design's model view, never inside a sketch and never while a preview overlay is up.
Picking
Hover highlights what you are about to get. Click takes it.
| Gesture | What it selects |
|---|---|
| Click | The highlighted vertex, edge, face, region or reference |
| Double-click | The whole body |
| Shift-click / Ctrl-click | Adds to the selection instead of replacing it |
| Alt while clicking | Reaches geometry hidden behind a solid |
| Click on empty space | Clears the selection |
Internalise Shift, because in Kapy a multi-selection is usually the point. Pick four edges together and you get one fillet feature carrying four edges, not four features. That distinction matters later, when you edit the fillet and want all four radii to change at once.
Box select
Drag with the left button and you get a marquee. The direction you drag decides how it behaves, following the convention CAD users already have in their fingers:
- Left to right paints a blue box and selects only what is entirely inside it.
- Right to left paints a green dashed box and selects everything it touches.
Shift or Ctrl adds the result to what you already had. Alt includes geometry behind solids, exactly as it does for a single click.
Selection filters
The Select tool carries a filter (everything, points, edges, planes or bodies) and it does two jobs. When a face keeps stealing the click from the edge you actually want, switch the filter to edges and only edges are pickable.
The filters also unlock the datums that are not really geometry. Set the filter to edges and the world X, Y and Z axes become selectable. Set it to planes and so do the principal XY, YZ and XZ planes. Feed those origin datums to any tool that needs an axis or a plane (revolve, a circular pattern, a mirror) instead of modelling the geometry first.
Why everything goes grey
The moment anything is selected, every body neutralises to grey so the blue of the selection reads against it, then returns to its own colour when you deselect. Nothing has been recoloured, and nothing is broken. A Tour of the Editor covers it too.
Esc and Delete
Delete (or Backspace) removes the current selection, and is ignored while you are typing in a field.
Esc is more specific than in most CAD apps:
- Mid-draw, Esc cancels the shape in progress and returns you to the Select tool. Points the cancelled shape had dropped, and that nothing else uses, go with it, so a cancelled rectangle leaves nothing behind. Anything already closed stays: Esc after a finished segment just ends the chain.
- With nothing in progress, Esc does not leave the sketch. Drawn work is never lost to a stray keypress. The way out is Finish sketch.
- The exception: a sketch you just created and have not drawn in yet is cancelled by Esc. Use that as the "wrong plane, back out" gesture.
Reading what you selected
The status bar keeps a running measurement of the selection: the length of one edge, the angle between two faces, the radius of an arc in a sketch. There is no measure tool to enter and leave. Select, read, carry on.
What you can hide
Two windows control what is on screen, and neither changes the model:
- Bodies: hide a body, recolour it, rename it, or make it the active one.
- Sketches: the same for sketches, which is how you get a finished sketch out of the way without deleting it.
The View window carries the viewport helpers: the coordinate axes, the XY grid, and the grid's ruler labels. The labels sit on the grid, so turning the grid off takes them with it.
See also
- A Tour of the Editor: why the toolbar changes as you select
- Keyboard Shortcuts: Esc, Delete and the modifiers
- Working with Several Bodies: what the active body decides