Canvas Navigation

How you pan and zoom the two zoomable canvases — the Viewer and the Node Graph. Both behave the same so the gestures are muscle-memory across panels. Mouse and trackpad are both first-class. The Pan tool (H) adds a left-drag pan to those two plus all three timeline modes.

Gestures

Gesture	Action
Scroll wheel (mouse)	Zoom, centered on the cursor
Pinch (trackpad)	Zoom, centered on the cursor
Two-finger swipe (trackpad)	Pan
Cmd + wheel	Zoom (explicit — works with any input)
Middle-mouse drag	Pan
Left-drag with the Pan tool (H)	Pan

Zooming is always cursor-centered: the point under the pointer stays put as the canvas scales, so you zoom into what you're looking at rather than the center of the panel.

The Pan tool (H)

H picks up the Pan tool from the top bar (it sits with Select and Edit); V or H again puts it down. While it is active, a plain left-drag pans — in the Viewer, in the node graph, and in all three timeline modes (Layers, Keys, Graph). The cursor turns into a grab hand over every surface it pans.

Panning takes the drag outright: with the tool active a left-drag never starts a marquee, a node drag, a keyframe drag, a clip trim or slide, or a playhead scrub. It is the tool to reach for when the thing you want to grab sits right where you need to start the drag.

Middle-mouse drag still pans regardless of the active tool — the Pan tool is the trackpad-friendly equivalent, not a replacement. The one exception is the Layers-mode track area, where middle-drag is the timeline's zoom gesture; there the Pan tool's left-drag is the pan.

The Graph editor and the timeline scroll rather than float, so the Pan tool slides them within their scroll range — horizontally through time, and vertically through tracks wherever there are tracks to scroll.

Mouse vs. trackpad

The editor picks pan vs. zoom automatically — there's no mode toggle:

• A plain mouse scroll wheel always zooms, at a fixed step per notch.
• A trackpad two-finger swipe pans, and a pinch zooms smoothly.
• Holding Cmd while scrolling forces a zoom. This works with any input device, so it's the reliable fallback whenever a gesture doesn't do what you expect.

Touch-surface mice

Some "mice" use a touch surface instead of a notched wheel — the Apple Magic Mouse and free-spin scroll wheels (e.g. some Logitech models). On these, a plain one-finger swipe pans instead of zooms. To zoom, hold Cmd while scrolling.

Zoom limits

Each canvas clamps zoom to its own range:

• Viewer: 5%–400%.
• Node Graph: 25%–300%.

The Viewer also has a Fit mode (scales the comp to the panel); zooming from Fit resolves to a concrete percentage and zooms from there.

Timeline (Keys & Graph)

The timeline's Keys (dope sheet) and Graph (graph editor) canvases follow the same mouse-vs-trackpad split, but the non-zoom gesture scrolls the timeline rather than panning a 2D canvas:

Gesture	Keys (dope sheet)	Graph editor
Two-finger swipe	Slide through time (horizontal) and tracks (vertical)	Slide through time (horizontal) and pan the value axis (vertical)
Pinch	Zoom the time axis	Zoom the time axis
Scroll wheel (mouse)	Zoom the time axis	Zoom the time axis
Alt + wheel	Native scroll	Zoom the value axis
Left-drag with the Pan tool (H)	Slide through time and tracks	Slide through time

Unlike the Viewer and node graph, time-axis zoom is centered on the playhead, not the cursor — as in After Effects. Pinch, scroll wheel, middle-drag, the + / - keys and the toolbar zoom buttons all behave the same in every timeline mode: the playhead stays where it is on screen while the frames scale around it, and if it is off screen the zoom brings it to the middle of the view.

Pinch-zoom on the time axis accumulates smoothly: a continuous pinch eases through the zoom levels rather than jumping, while a mouse wheel still moves exactly one zoom step per notch.

The Layers track area pans with the Pan tool too. Middle-drag there zooms the time axis (drag up to zoom in) rather than panning — the one place middle-drag is not a pan.

Related

• Timeline Panel — the timeline has its own horizontal (time) zoom; see its zoom shortcuts.
• Keyboard shortcuts — the canvas-navigation gestures are also listed there.