Working fast in freeform
The shortcuts, drag gestures, and pen habits that make a freeform board quick, plus the Miro and Poppy equivalents if you are switching over.
A freeform board is a real canvas, and it expects canvas muscle memory. If you have run a workshop in Miro or sketched a flow in Poppy, most of what your hands already do works here unchanged. This is the short list of what to try first.
The cheat sheet lives on the board
Open a board in freeform view and click the gear button in the bottom-right corner, then pick Board shortcuts. The panel lists every key and gesture for the view you are in, with the right symbols for your keyboard, and it updates if you rebind anything in settings.
Moving around
- Right-click and drag to pan. Hold the right mouse button anywhere and drag. It works on top of a card, a sticky, or empty canvas, so you never have to hunt for a gap first. A quick right-click with no movement still opens the context menu.
- Or hold Space and drag, the classic canvas hold. H switches to the pan tool for good, and V goes back to select.
- Scroll or pinch to zoom. Cmd+0 (Ctrl+0) fits everything on the board into view.
Copying things
- Cmd+C, then Cmd+V. The paste lands under your cursor, not back on top of the original. Point at the empty space you want it in, then paste. If your cursor is off the canvas, it lands in the middle of your view instead.
- Cmd+J duplicates in place, nudged slightly off the original. Good for a quick "one more of these" when you do not care where it goes yet.
- Hold Option (Alt) and drag to pull a copy straight out of an item. The original stays put, the copy follows your cursor, and it is still selected when you let go, so you can type into it or drag it again immediately.
- Add Shift to that drag to lock the copy to one axis. That is how you get a straight row or a straight column without eyeballing it.
- Press Escape mid-drag to call the whole thing off. The copy disappears and the original never moved.
Undo and redo
Cmd+Z undoes. Cmd+Y or Shift+Cmd+Z redoes, whichever one your hands already know.
Undo is yours alone. It walks back the things you moved, resized, deleted, duplicated, pasted, and created, not a teammate's edits on a shared board. Switching to another board, or flipping the same board to grid view, starts a fresh history.
If Cmd+Z seems to do nothing, click an empty patch of canvas first. The shortcut only fires when the canvas itself has focus, not a sidebar or a popover.
Drawing on the board
- P picks up the pen, and the pen stays picked up after each stroke. You can circle a bad headline, cross out two cards, and draw three arrows without going back to the toolbar between strokes. It also does not select the stroke you just drew, so the next one starts clean.
- E is the eraser, and it sticks in the same way.
- Escape or V drops you back to the select tool when the annotation burst is over.
- R draws a rectangle, T places a text label, L is a plain line, and Shift+L is an arrow.
The laser pointer
K picks up the laser pointer. Treat it as throwaway ink: draw with it while you talk, and the stroke fades out on its own a second or two later. Nothing is saved and nothing lands on the board, which makes it the right tool for pointing at things on a call or in a screen recording. Reach for the pen instead when you want the mark to stay.
Coming from Miro or Poppy
| What you do there | What to do here |
|---|---|
| Space or right-drag to pan | The same, and right-click drag works on top of items too |
| Cmd/Ctrl + D to duplicate | Cmd+J, or Option-drag a copy out of the original |
| Option/Alt + drag to clone | The same |
| Shift+Cmd+Z to redo | The same, and Cmd+Y works as well |
| Paste at the pointer | The same |
| Sticky notes as the default unit | C makes a card, D makes a document, S makes a section |
The two habits worth unlearning: Eden's boards hold real saved items, not just shapes, so a card can be a post, a video, or a document you write in. And the pen is for marks you keep, while the laser is for marks you do not.
Where to go next
- To line things up as you drag, read grid and snapping on the freeform canvas.
- To group areas of a canvas into named regions, read using sections.
- New to boards entirely? Start with creating your first board.
Grid and snapping on the freeform canvas
Turn on the background dot grid, snap items while you drag, and use the Cmd/Ctrl modifier to snap on demand or break free.
Creating your first board
Create a board, add your first sources, then choose grid view for a swipe file or freeform canvas for a spatial creative project.
Using sections to organize a board
Sections are filters inside one board that show you one slice at a time. Here is how to use them, and when they beat splitting into separate boards.
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