Krita Canvas Navigation & View Shortcuts
Rotation, mirroring and zoom in Krita are not incidental view controls — they are working tools that painters reach for many times an hour, which is why they get bare-letter bindings and dedicated keys rather than living in a menu. All of them are view transforms: none writes to the file, none appears in the undo history, and the image saves exactly as painted regardless of the angle, flip or zoom the view was left at when you closed it.
| 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. |
The rotation bindings are the clearest example of Krita's painting-first design. Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+] step the canvas left and right, numpad 4 and 6 do the same, and Shift with a middle-mouse drag rotates freely to any angle. Three routes to one action looks like redundancy until you notice they suit different hands: the bracket combinations work while the other hand holds a stylus, the numpad suits a keyboard-heavy setup, and the free drag is the only one that reaches an arbitrary angle rather than a fixed increment.
That generosity has a gap, and it is the single most common complaint about navigating Krita. Resetting rotation is bound to numpad 5 and to nothing else. On a laptop or a tenkeyless keyboard the action exists but is unreachable, so a canvas knocked askew by an accidental Shift+middle-drag has no keyboard route back to level. View ▸ Reset Canvas Rotation works, and assigning it a real key is one of the few customisations worth making before you have used Krita for an hour.
Mirroring with M is a different kind of tool. It flips the view horizontally and changes nothing in the file. The reason it earns a single letter is perceptual rather than technical: after an hour on the same drawing your eye stops registering asymmetry, having quietly normalised whatever is on screen. Reversing the image defeats that adaptation, and errors you have looked past all afternoon — a face drifting to one side, a horizon that is not level — become obvious immediately. Traditional painters achieve the same thing with a mirror, and the digital version is faster to consult, so most people press M far more often than they expected to.
Zoom splits along the same lines. Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- step through preset levels, while Ctrl with the scroll wheel zooms continuously and keeps the point under the cursor anchored — which is why the scroll version is what most people end up using while painting, since it does not require re-finding the spot you were working on. Ctrl+0 returns to 100%, and that one deserves more use than it gets: at any other zoom level Krita is showing an interpolated approximation, so judgements about fine detail, edge hardness or noise made at 63% are judgements about a resampled preview rather than the actual pixels.
Tab and Ctrl+Shift+F both maximise the artwork on screen but do opposite things to get there. Tab hides every docker, toolbar and menu, leaving the image alone against the application background while the window stays exactly where it was. Ctrl+Shift+F keeps the whole interface and removes the window chrome, expanding Krita to fill the display. They compose — pressing both gives artwork across the entire screen with no interface at all. Tab is also the shortcut most likely to be hit by accident, and a first-time user who does so reasonably concludes the program has crashed rather than that a toggle has fired. Pressing Tab again is the entire fix.
One behaviour worth understanding is what these view controls do to the relationship between the cursor and the image. Rotation and mirroring both remap the canvas underneath a stylus that has not moved, so a tablet mapped to the full screen still reports the same physical position while the pixel under it has changed. In practice this is seamless — Krita handles the transform — but it explains why a rotated canvas can feel briefly disorienting even though nothing about the input has changed. Painters who rotate heavily tend to work in smaller increments for exactly this reason, turning the canvas twenty degrees at a time rather than ninety, because the hand adapts to a small change without a conscious reset.
The practical shape of a navigation habit, then, looks like this: continuous scroll-zoom for moving around while painting, Ctrl+0 before any judgement about detail, stepped rotation to bring a curve into a comfortable arc, free rotation when an angle has to match something specific, and M at intervals throughout — not because anything has gone wrong, but because the check is cheap and the errors it catches are the ones that survive to the finished piece. None of these leave a trace in the file, which is what makes them safe to use without thinking, and that in turn is what makes them worth binding to keys at all.