Krita Keyboard Shortcuts
Krita was built from the ground up for painters rather than adapted from a general image editor, and the shortcut map reflects that. Canvas rotation and mirroring get dedicated bindings in a way photo editors rarely bother with, because checking a painting's composition by flipping it horizontally is a routine act in digital painting, not a rare one. Brush size, opacity and colour value all have single-key controls tuned for repeated use mid-stroke, when the other hand is on a tablet and reaching for a menu would break the line you are drawing. That design has a consequence worth knowing before you memorise anything: Krita's single-letter keys are dense. B, E, P, F, G, C, T, J and Q are all bound to different tools, and A, R and S are bound to selection modes rather than tools. On other software those letters would be free. Here they are not, which is why Krita ships alternative shortcut schemes — including a Photoshop-compatible one — under Settings ▸ Configure Krita ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts. If you came from Photoshop and keep reaching for the wrong key, switching scheme is a more honest fix than relearning muscle memory you use daily in another program. A second caveat applies to everything below. Krita's defaults have shifted between major versions, more than most applications, and some actions documented in older references are no longer bound at all. Where a binding is version-sensitive or depends on a docker being open, this page says so rather than presenting it as settled. If a key here does nothing in your build, the Keyboard Shortcuts search box will tell you what it is actually bound to in that version — that is the authoritative answer for your install, and it takes about ten seconds.
Canvas Navigation
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rotate canvas | Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+] | Cmd+[ / Cmd+] | Rotates the canvas view left or right in fixed increments without touching the artwork itself. The numpad 4 and 6 keys do the same job on keyboards that have them, and holding Shift while dragging with the middle mouse button rotates freely to any angle. |
| Reset canvas rotation | 5 (numpad) | 5 (numpad) | Snaps the canvas back to zero degrees after free rotation has left it at an awkward angle. On a keyboard without a numpad this one is genuinely missing and worth rebinding, since free rotation is easy to trigger by accident. |
| Mirror canvas view | M | M | Flips the view horizontally. Nothing in the file changes — this is a viewing aid that exposes drawing errors your eye has stopped noticing, the digital equivalent of holding a drawing up to a mirror. |
| Zoom in / out | Ctrl++ / Ctrl+- | Cmd++ / Cmd+- | Steps the zoom level up or down. Holding Ctrl while scrolling gives continuous zoom instead, which is usually the better option while painting because it keeps the cursor position anchored. |
| Reset zoom to 100% | Ctrl+0 | Cmd+0 | Returns to a one-image-pixel-per-screen-pixel view. Worth pressing before judging fine detail, because at any other zoom level Krita is showing you an interpolated approximation rather than the actual pixels. |
| Show canvas only | Tab | Tab | Hides every docker, toolbar and menu, leaving the artwork alone on screen. Press Tab again to bring the interface back — the state is a toggle, and new users who hit it accidentally often assume the program has broken. |
| Full screen mode | Ctrl+Shift+F | Cmd+Shift+F | Takes the whole Krita window fullscreen, dockers included. Distinct from Tab's canvas-only mode: this one removes the window chrome and keeps the interface, where Tab removes the interface and keeps the window. |
Brush Painting
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Increase / decrease brush size | ] / [ | ] / [ | Steps the active brush's diameter up or down. The step is proportional rather than fixed, so the same keypress moves a 400px brush much further than a 6px one — which is what you want when moving between blocking-in and detail work. |
| Increase / decrease brush opacity | O / I | O / I | Adjusts the brush's opacity in steps without opening the brush editor. Note this changes the tool's opacity setting, not the layer's — a distinction that catches people out when a stroke looks weaker than expected on an already-transparent layer. |
| Toggle eraser mode | E | E | Flips the current brush into erase mode and back, keeping every other brush property intact. This is not a switch to a separate eraser tool: a textured bristle brush erases with that same texture, which is the whole point. |
| Sample colour from the canvas | Hold Ctrl while painting, or P | Hold Cmd while painting, or P | Holding Ctrl samples a colour and returns to the brush the moment you release, which suits mid-stroke picking. Pressing P switches to the colour picker tool properly and stays there — use that when you need the tool's options, such as sampling merged rather than from the active layer. |
| Freehand brush tool | B | B | Returns to the freehand brush from whichever tool you drifted into. Worth learning early precisely because so many other single letters in Krita are tools — B is the way back. |
| Swap foreground and background colour | X | X | Exchanges the two active colours. Paired with D, which resets them to black and white, this is the fastest way to alternate between a colour and its counterpart while blocking in shapes. |
| Reset foreground and background colour | D | D | Sets the foreground to black and the background to white. Most useful when working on masks, where black and white are not aesthetic choices but the two values that actually mean hide and reveal. |
| Make brush colour lighter / darker | L / K | L / K | Nudges the current colour up or down in value without going near the colour selector. This is how you build a value ramp while painting rather than picking each step by eye, and it is one of the few Krita bindings with no real equivalent in Photoshop. |
| Fill with foreground colour | Shift+Backspace | Shift+Delete | Floods the active layer, or the current selection if one exists, with the foreground colour. Plain Backspace does the same with the background colour, and adding Ctrl to either respects the layer's opacity rather than overwriting it. |
| Show brush editor | F5 | F5 | Opens the full brush settings popup for the active preset. F6 opens the preset chooser instead — the pair is worth keeping straight, since one edits the brush you have and the other swaps it for a different one. |
Layers
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add a paint layer | Insert | Insert (or fn+Return on compact keyboards) | Adds a new paint layer directly above the active one. Krita's Insert binding is unusual — most editors use a Ctrl+Shift combination — and it is genuinely awkward on laptop keyboards that reach Insert only through a function-key layer. |
| Duplicate layer or mask | Ctrl+J | Cmd+J | Copies the active layer or mask in place. The standard move before a destructive filter or transform, so the original stays intact underneath while you decide whether the change was an improvement. |
| Merge with layer below | Ctrl+E | Cmd+E | Collapses the active layer into the one beneath it. Adding Shift — Ctrl+Shift+E — flattens the entire image instead, a much larger and easily-mistyped difference between two adjacent shortcuts. |
| Quick group | Ctrl+G | Cmd+G | Wraps the selected layers in a group. Ctrl+Shift+G creates a quick clipping group instead, where the group is masked by its lowest layer — the usual way to paint inside a shape without spilling over its edges. |
| Activate next / previous layer | Page Up / Page Down | Page Up / Page Down (fn+Up / fn+Down) | Walks the selection up and down the layer stack without leaving the canvas. Adding Ctrl moves the layer itself instead of the selection, which is the difference between browsing the stack and reordering it. |
| Copy selection to a new layer | Ctrl+Alt+J | Cmd+Option+J | Lifts whatever is inside the current selection onto its own new layer, leaving the original untouched. Ctrl+Shift+J cuts instead of copies, removing the pixels from the source layer as it goes. |
| Rename current layer | F2 | F2 | Puts the active layer's name into edit mode without hunting for it in the docker. Trivial on a three-layer sketch and genuinely valuable on a forty-layer illustration where every layer is still called 'Paint Layer 12'. |
Selections Transform
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Select all | Ctrl+A | Cmd+A | Selects the full canvas area. Mostly a setup step — for copying a whole layer, or for giving a transform something explicit to act on rather than relying on the layer bounds. |
| Deselect | Ctrl+Shift+A | Cmd+Shift+A | Clears the active selection. Krita does not deselect on a stray canvas click the way some editors do, so this is the reliable way out — and the first thing to try when brush strokes mysteriously refuse to appear outside one region. |
| Reselect | Ctrl+Shift+D | Cmd+Shift+D | Brings back the selection you just cleared, with its exact shape and feathering. Saves rebuilding a fiddly lasso outline after deselecting one action too early. |
| Invert selection | Ctrl+Shift+I | Cmd+Shift+I | Swaps selected for unselected. Note the neighbouring Ctrl+I applies the Invert colour filter instead — two very different results one modifier apart, and a common source of accidental negatives. |
| Transform tool | Ctrl+T | Cmd+T | Opens the transform tool on the active layer or selection. Krita's version offers free, perspective, warp, cage, liquify and mesh modes from the tool options — considerably more than the free-transform box the shortcut suggests. |
| Rectangular selection tool | Ctrl+R | Cmd+R | Switches to rectangular marquee selection. J switches to the elliptical equivalent — note that neither cycles between the two the way a single tool slot would in Photoshop; they are separate tools with separate keys. |
| Selection mode: replace / add / subtract | R / A / S | R / A / S | Sets what the next selection does to the existing one, rather than requiring a held modifier for each drag. Setting the mode once and making several selections is far less error-prone than holding Shift or Alt correctly every time. |
| Display selection | Ctrl+H | Cmd+H | Toggles the marching-ants overlay while leaving the selection itself active. Useful for judging an edge without the animated outline over it — but it is also how people lose track of a selection entirely and start wondering why half the canvas is unpaintable. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does pressing E not switch to an eraser tool?
Because Krita has no separate eraser tool to switch to. E toggles erase mode on the brush you are already holding, so a textured bristle brush erases with bristle texture and a soft airbrush erases softly. Treating erasing as a property of the current brush rather than a distinct tool means the mark you remove has the same character as the mark you made, which matters when you are erasing into a painted edge rather than clearing a block of colour.
My canvas is stuck at an angle and numpad 5 does nothing — what now?
Numpad 5 resets rotation, and on a keyboard with no numeric keypad that action has no default binding at all. Laptop users hit this constantly, usually after triggering free rotation by accident with a Shift+middle-drag. The reliable route without a numpad is View ▸ Reset Canvas Rotation, and it is worth assigning a real key to that action in Settings ▸ Configure Krita ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts if you use a compact keyboard.
Ctrl+I inverted my artwork instead of my selection. Is that a bug?
No — Ctrl+I is the Invert colour filter and Ctrl+Shift+I is Invert Selection. The two sit one modifier apart and produce results that look nothing alike, so the mistake announces itself immediately. Ctrl+Z reverses it cleanly since the filter is a normal undoable action. Photoshop users hit this more often than anyone, because there Ctrl+I is bound to the selection inversion they are reaching for.
Why are so many single letters already taken?
Krita binds tools and painting actions to bare letters rather than reserving them: B, P, F, G, C, T, J and Q are tools, E toggles erase mode, D and X handle colours, and A, R and S set selection modes. The upside is that a painter working one-handed on a tablet can reach almost everything without a modifier. The downside is that letters free in other software are not free here, which is exactly why Krita ships alternative schemes — including a Photoshop-compatible one — in the shortcut settings.
Do these shortcuts differ on macOS?
The pattern is the usual one: Ctrl becomes Cmd for combinations like Ctrl+T or Ctrl+J, while bare-letter bindings such as B, E, M and X are identical across platforms. Two differences are physical rather than logical — Insert and the Page Up/Page Down keys used for layer actions need function-key layers on most Mac keyboards, and the numpad rotation reset is unavailable on any keyboard without a numeric keypad regardless of operating system.
Is there a way to see every binding for the version I actually have?
Settings ▸ Configure Krita ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts lists every action, including the many that ship with no key assigned, and its search box accepts either an action name or a keystroke. That is the authoritative answer for your specific build, which matters here more than in most applications because Krita's defaults have moved between major versions and some older published references document bindings that no longer exist.
What is the difference between Tab and Ctrl+Shift+F?
Tab hides the interface and keeps the window — dockers, toolbars and menus disappear, leaving the artwork on the application background. Ctrl+Shift+F hides the window chrome and keeps the interface, expanding Krita to fill the display with the dockers still present. They compose, so pressing both gives artwork filling the entire screen with nothing else visible, which is the closest Krita gets to a distraction-free painting mode.
Why does my brush only paint in one part of the canvas?
Almost always an active selection you have lost sight of, particularly if Ctrl+H has hidden the marching-ants overlay. Ctrl+Shift+A deselects and restores painting everywhere; if that fixes it, the selection was the cause. The other candidate is a layer with alpha inheritance or a clipping group enabled, which confines strokes to the pixels of the layer below — check the layer docker's icons before assuming the selection was to blame.
How do I make a brush bigger by a precise amount rather than by steps?
The bracket keys step proportionally, which is fast but imprecise by design. For an exact diameter, hold Shift and drag horizontally on the canvas — Krita shows the numeric size as you drag, so you can land on a specific value. The brush editor at F5 accepts a typed number if you need to reproduce an exact size across sessions, which is the only method that survives closing the file.
Does mirroring the canvas with M change the saved file?
No. M mirrors the view only; the pixels are untouched and the file saves exactly as painted. It exists because eyes adapt to a composition over time and stop registering asymmetry — flipping the view resets that adaptation and makes a lopsided face or a drifting horizon obvious. If you actually want to flip the artwork, that lives under Image ▸ Mirror Image Horizontally, which is a genuine edit and shows up in the undo history.