Canvas & navigation

Pan, zoom, the grid, background references, the draw order, rendering styles, and how to find your way around the plan.

The canvas is where everything is drawn. It renders your plan procedurally from data every frame, so it stays sharp at any zoom, and it always draws on a paper-white (or blueprint) sheet, even when the rest of the app is in dark mode.

Moving around

• Zoom range is clamped to 0.05×–50×. There is no panning limit, you can scroll the plan anywhere on screen.
• Zoom pivots where you point. A pinch zooms around your fingers (or around the selected element when something is selected); the Mac scroll wheel zooms around the cursor.
• Stepped zoom (Mac): ⌘= and ⌘− zoom in and out a notch, and ⌘0 resets - they live in the View menu, so they’re Mac-only. On iPad, zooming is the pinch (tool shortcuts like ⌘1–⌘9 do work on a hardware keyboard - see Keyboard shortcuts).
• Mouse scroll-wheel zoom (Mac) only responds to a notched wheel; a trackpad keeps pinch-to-zoom, so the two never fight.

Selection & the camera

A single tap selects without moving the view, so picking something to edit never yanks the canvas around. To bring an element to centre, double-tap (or double-click) it: the camera glides over at your current zoom, it pans but never re-zooms. On a side-panel layout (Mac and landscape iPad) the element lands in the centre; on a bottom-sheet layout (iPhone) it’s biased upward so the editor sheet doesn’t cover what you selected.

The camera also holds still while you edit: drawing, moving or deleting walls never makes the view jump. And on Mac and iPad the floating properties panel slides over the canvas without shifting the plan, if your selection would end up hidden behind the panel, the view slides just far enough to keep it in sight.

The grid

The grid is drawn in real-world units and culled to what’s visible, so it stays fast even when you zoom far out.

• Grid sizes are yours to set. In Settings under Canvas grid, Sub grid sets the small squares (0.5 m by default) and Grid sets the heavier major lines (1 m by default). Type either in your working unit; the Grid value snaps to a whole number of sub-grid squares so the two always nest.
• Hide it when you don’t need it with the Grid toggle in Visible layers.
• Empty canvas: a brand-new drawing with no walls shows a sensible 6 m × 6 m blank area at a readable grid spacing, so you always have somewhere to start building.

Background image & drawing

Menu → Background puts a reference behind the grid to draw over:

• Image, import a photo, sketch or scanned plan, position it, set its real-world width (the height keeps the picture’s proportions) and fade it back. It’s locked to the plan, so it pans and zooms with your drawing, and it travels with the drawing when you save or share the file.
• Drawing, overlay another drawing from the same project as a faint, walls-only outline, ideal for lining one storey up over another. Pick it, fade it, hide it or remove it; on pick the view re-frames so you can see both plans together.

Both are screen-only drawing aids: they never appear in any export.

Rendering styles

Two canvas styles ship in the box (set in Settings):

• Normal, black walls and clear symbols on a paper-white sheet (the default architectural look).
• Blueprint, a deep cyanotype-navy background with white linework and a warm-orange selection highlight.

The plan always renders light regardless of system dark mode, a floor plan reads the same on paper either way, and inverting it would wash the symbols out. Only the floating UI (tool palette, sheets, pills) follows your light/dark appearance.

What’s drawn, and in what order

Each frame paints in layers, bottom to top, useful to know when elements overlap:

1. Background image & background drawing (when set)
2. Grid
3. Active-room highlight (Room tool)
4. Walls
5. Doors
6. Windows
7. Opening markers (dashed threshold and jamb ticks)
8. Structural voids (on the floor, under the furniture)
9. Fixtures & furniture
10. Lights
11. Radiators / heat sources
12. Measurement labels
13. Invalid-room outlines (dashed amber)
14. Room labels
15. Sheet annotations (text, north arrow, scale bar, watermark) and the persistent red measurement tape
16. Snap & connection indicators (alignment guides, Connect-mode seams)
17. Drawing previews & handles (rubber-band line, dashed box, knife guide, mid-wall handles, corner-angle arcs, live dimension pills)
18. Measuring tape (the red dimension line while you slide an opening or pull a wall)
19. Placement crosshair and the red placement pin (always on top)

Structural geometry (walls, doors, windows) is drawn first so that fittings, labels and interactive guides always sit on top.

On top of the canvas, a few floating overlays ride above everything: the area · perimeter readout pill (top-leading), the active-tool hint banner (top-centre), and the Set length pill with its deselect ✕ when a wall is selected in the Walls tool.

World-space sizing

Wall thickness, door leaves, window frames and opening widths are all stored in real-world metres and scaled to the screen by the current zoom, never faked to a constant on-screen size. Zoom out far enough and a thin wall becomes sub-pixel; that’s expected, just zoom back in.

Plan annotations follow the same rule, CAD-style: wall-length labels have a fixed real-world height (capped so they never dominate the plan, and faded out once too small to read), and room names are sized in points like CAD annotation text, so both scale with the drawing and keep the same size relative to the plan on screen and in PDF exports. Only interactive chrome (live dimension pills, hint banners) and construction lines (swing arcs, casement indicators) keep a fixed on-screen size so they stay legible.

Next

• Coordinate system & units
• Editing & selection