The board can be driven entirely from the keyboard, and it has a pen that is not a widget. Neither was written down anywhere. This is both, including the parts that only make sense once you know they are there.
Without a plan: Every shortcut, and the pen, on every plan including signed out
The board works without a mouse
Not partially, and not as a fallback. You can reach every widget, move it, resize it, step inside it to use its own controls, and delete it, without a pointer at any point.
There is also a third route that needs neither pointer nor grab: the inspector takes the four geometry numbers directly, so a widget can be positioned by typing. That exists because dragging is a motion some people cannot perform, and an interface whose only route to a result is a drag has excluded them.
Getting around a slide
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tab | Into the slide, and back out of it in one press |
| ← ↑ → ↓ | Move between widgets — and select the one you land on |
| Home / End | First or last widget |
| Enter | Step inside a widget to use its own controls |
| Esc | Step back out |
The arrows move directionally, not in a list order: pressing → goes to the widget to the right of the one you are on, which is what a slide looks like to the person reading it.
Enter steps inside. That is the distinction worth understanding: on the frame, the keys below move the widget; inside it, Tab and the arrows belong to the widget’s own controls, so you can start a timer or turn a word-bank card over. Escape comes back out to the frame.
Picking a widget up
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Pick it up; arrows move it; Space puts it down |
| Shift + Space | Pick it up to resize instead |
| Shift + arrow | A bigger step |
| Alt + arrow | A single pixel, ignoring the guides |
| Esc | Put it back where it was |
| Del / Backspace | Delete the selected widget |
A grab is a mode: you pick the widget up, the arrows move it instead of moving your focus, and you put it down. Escape during a grab puts it back where it started rather than leaving it half-moved, which is the behaviour a pointer drag has and a keyboard one usually does not.
The whole grab is one undo step, not one per arrow press. A held arrow key would otherwise push thirty snapshots a second and destroy the undo history — the same granularity a pointer drag gets.
The guides, and ignoring them
While you move or resize — by pointer or by keyboard — the board shows alignment guides against the other widgets on the slide and snaps to them. That is what makes two things line up without measuring.
Hold Alt and the guides are ignored, and the step becomes a single pixel. Use it when the thing you want is deliberately a few pixels off something else — the snap is a help until it is the only thing standing between you and the position you actually want.
The Layers panel
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ctrl + I | Open and close it |
| ↑ ↓ | Move through the list |
| ← → | Close or open a section, or step into it |
| Alt + ↑ ↓ | Move a widget in front of or behind another |
| F2 | Rename |
| Type a name | Jump to it |
The board itself
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| V / P | Select tool, pen tool |
| Ctrl + Z / Y | Undo, redo |
| ? | This list |
| Esc | Close whatever is open |
The pen, which is not a widget
Press P — or pick the pen in the toolbar — and you are drawing on the slide rather than arranging it. The ink belongs to the slide, not to a widget, so it sits over everything and moves with the slide when you present.
It is free. There is no tier check on the pen at all, including signed out.
- Freehand — Draw. What a pen does.
- Line — A straight line between where you press and where you let go.
- Rectangle — For boxing a character or a column of a table.
- Ellipse — For circling the thing you are talking about.
- Erase stroke — Removes a whole stroke you drew, not a hole in the middle of it. Closer to undo than to a rubber.
Six colours, and a stroke-width slider. Clear all removes every mark on the current slide at once — and like any other board edit it is one undo step, so clearing by accident is recoverable.
Picking the pen clears the selection, which is deliberate: you cannot be arranging a widget and drawing at the same time, and leaving a selection outline under the ink would make the slide look broken in present mode.
The “Back” chip, and why it sometimes is not there
Open the board from a lesson, a dictionary entry or a tool page and a small Back chip appears, returning you to where you came from. It is carried in the address — which means it can be edited, and therefore cannot be trusted.
So it is checked by shape before it is rendered: one leading slash and path characters only. Anything else — another site, a scheme, a query, something absurdly long — fails the check and the chip simply does not appear. A "Back" button on a Mandarin Temple page that navigates somewhere else is worse than no button, and a tutor who did not write the link does not need an error message about it.
Common questions
No — that is deliberate. Tab is for getting past the canvas in one press; the arrow keys are how you move between widgets. Stepping into a widget with Enter is what hands Tab to the widget’s own controls.