Keyboard and mouse¶

The same list is available in the app under Help → Keyboard Shortcuts.

Modifiers are written with macOS names — see the conventions note for the mapping to Linux and Windows.

General¶

Key	Does
`Cmd`+`Shift`+`P`	Open the command palette

Command palette¶

If you only remember one shortcut, make it this one. Cmd+Shift+P opens a search box listing every command in the menu bar — type a few letters, press Enter to run the highlighted one.

Matching is fuzzy and skips ahead, so initials work: gs finds Grow Selection, dh finds Distance Heatmap, csv finds Export ▸ Meta Data ▸ To CSV. You can also search by the menu a command lives in — typing export lists everything under the Export menu.

Each row shows the command's own shortcut on the right, which makes the palette a practical way to learn the shortcuts for the things you do often. Commands you have run recently are offered first.

Commands that are unavailable right now — the Distance Heatmap before a project is loaded, say — are still listed, greyed out, rather than hidden, so you can see that a feature exists and that it is merely waiting on something.

Navigate with Up / Down, and Esc to dismiss.

Not everything in the palette comes from the menu bar: a few control-panel buttons are in there too, listed under the panel they belong to — Run UMAP/MDS/t-SNE and Compute Neighborhood Fidelity under Embedding, the clustering Run / Clear / Apply / Export actions under Clustering, and so on. The dimensionality-reduction entry follows whichever method is selected, so it reads "Run t-SNE" when t-SNE is chosen — but searching umap finds it either way.

Adding your own

Any panel can contribute commands by defining a palette_commands() method returning Command objects; command_from_button() wraps an existing QPushButton in one line. See ScatterControls._PALETTE_BUTTONS in bigclust2/gui/controls/scatter_control.py for the pattern. Everything already in the menu bar is picked up automatically and needs no registration.

Scatter plot¶

Bare-letter shortcuts only fire when the scatter plot has focus, so they never hijack typing in a filter or search field.

Mouse¶

Gesture	Does
left-click + drag	Move the view
`Shift` + drag	Draw a selection box
`Shift`+`Cmd` + drag	Add a box selection to the current selection
`Shift`+`Ctrl` + drag	Draw a lasso selection
`Shift`+`Ctrl`+`Cmd` + drag	Add a lasso selection to the current selection
scroll	Zoom
double-click a label	Highlight points with the same label
`Shift` + double-click a label	Select points with the same label
`Cmd`+`Shift` + double-click a label	Add same-label points to the selection

Keys¶

Key	Does
`Esc`	Deselect all points
`Shift`+`C`	Centre the view on the current selection
`C`	Toggle the control panel
`L`	Toggle labels
`Tab`	Flip between two configured property states (Color / Labels)
`Space`	Cycle through embeddings
`Right`	Increase label font size
`Left`	Decrease label font size
`Up`	Increase marker size
`Down`	Decrease marker size
`F`	Toggle the FPS counter

Tab is configured under General → Selection Behavior → Configure Tab toggle: pick a property (Color by, Labels) and a column for state A and state B, and Tab flips between them. Comparing two colourings by flicking back and forth is far more effective than looking at them side by side.

Selection¶

Key	Does
`Cmd`+`A`	Select all points
`Cmd`+`I`	Invert the selection
`Cmd`+`+`	Grow the selection (add nearest points)
`Cmd`+`-`	Shrink the selection (undo the last grow)
`H`	Hide the selected neurons
`Alt`+`H`	Show all hidden neurons
`Backspace`	Remove the selected neurons (selection views only)
`Cmd`+`C`	Copy selected IDs to the clipboard

Set Annotations shares a chord with Select All

Selection → Set Annotations is Cmd+A on macOS and Ctrl+A elsewhere. Select All is Cmd+A on macOS only — on other platforms it has no shortcut, precisely to avoid the collision.

See how selection works for what growing and shrinking actually do.

Views and windows¶

Key	Does
`Cmd`+`T`	Open a new view
`Cmd`+`W`	Close the current view
`Shift`+`Cmd`+`N`	Open a new window
`Shift`+`Ctrl`+`W`	Close the current window
`Shift`+`Cmd`+`Ctrl`+`N`	Open the current selection in a new view
`Cmd`+`1` … `Cmd`+`9`	Switch to the n-th view (9 = last view)
`Cmd`+`M`	Minimise the window

Widgets¶

Key	Opens
`Shift`+`Cmd`+`C`	Connectivity Table
`Shift`+`Cmd`+`D`	Distance Heatmap
`Shift`+`Cmd`+`F`	Feature Comparison
`Shift`+`Cmd`+`M`	Meta Data Explorer

All four are disabled until a project is loaded.

Files¶

Key	Does
`Cmd`+`O`	Open Project

3D viewer¶

Gesture / key	Does
left-click + hold	Rotate the view
middle-click + hold	Pan
scroll	Zoom
`C`	Toggle the legend
`1`	Align view: front
`2`	Align view: side
`3`	Align view: top

Note C means different things depending on which pane has focus — the control panel over the scatter plot, the legend over the viewer.