Navigation
Camera
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Right-drag | Orbit around the part |
| Middle-drag, or Shift + right-drag | Pan |
| Mouse wheel | Zoom |
| Esc | Cancel what's in progress; again to return to Select |
Only the Select tool treats plain clicks as picking — drawing tools use them to draw, which is why the camera bindings live on the right mouse button.
On a touch screen
| Gesture | Action |
|---|---|
| Two-finger drag | Pan |
| Pinch | Zoom |
| Three-finger drag | Orbit |
Touch mode switches on at the first touch: pick targets grow to finger size, and on phone-width screens the side panes become floating windows, toggled from the bottom bar. While a finger drags a shape or vertex, a magnifier floats beside it showing what the finger covers, so snap points stay aimable. A trackpad pinch zooms the same way. Focusing any value field floats an on-screen keypad — digits, units, operators, and your parameter names as one-tap chips — and a long press opens the same menus a right-click does.
Zoom to fit (in the command palette and the View menu) frames your selection — or the whole model — in one step.
Auto-zoom (the toggle next to Zoom to fit in the toolbar) keeps your geometry
framed: type rectangle dimensions bigger than the view, or drag an extrusion past the
edge, and the camera glides out to fit — shrink it back and the camera glides in.
Committed results count too: confirm an extrusion taller than the view and the camera
glides out to show the whole body; undo it and the view glides back in. Selections too:
pick a face that's half out of view and the camera glides out until all of it is on
screen — only ever outward, so selecting something small never dives the camera in.
Scripts: bearcad.ui.auto_zoom(true).
Keyboard shortcuts
View → Keyboard Shortcuts (also under Help) lists every binding in the app, grouped by where it applies.
Command palette
⌘/Ctrl+P opens the command palette: a searchable list of context-pertinent commands — tools, views, document actions — filtered as you type. Arrow keys move the highlight and Enter runs it. Any action without a visible button is reachable here.
The view bear
The bear-shaped cube in the corner — the view bear — snaps to standard views: click a face, edge, or corner. The house icon returns to the Home view (right-click it to save the current view as Home).
The gear icon under the view bear opens display settings:
- Projection — orthographic (flat, technical) or perspective (natural).
- Shading — wireframe, transparent, solid, solid + visible edges, or realistic lighting. Curved surfaces shade smoothly, while real edges — box corners, chamfers, extrusion caps — stay crisp.
- Ground — grid lines or a solid ground plane. Grid lines follow the document's units — millimetre powers of ten, or inches and feet — and finer subdivisions fade in between the heavier lines as you zoom.
These change how you see the model, never the model itself.
Sketch mode
While a sketch is open the viewport has an orange border. The camera still works normally; Esc leaves the sketch.