Keyboard & mouse¶

Serpentine3D is command-line first, but the mouse and shortcuts cover navigation, selection and the common operations. Everything here is remappable in Settings → Shortcuts and Settings → Mouse.

Input	Action
Right-mouse drag	Orbit (pan in a parallel view)
Shift + right-drag	Pan
Ctrl + right-drag	Zoom (drag up to come closer)
Ctrl + Shift + right-drag	Orbit, even in a parallel view
Alt + right-drag	Turn to face the nearest axis (see below)
Scroll wheel	Zoom (anchors on the cursor)
`F1` / `F2` / `F3` / `F4`	Top / Front / Right / Perspective
`Ctrl`+`E`	Zoom to fit (extents)
`F7`	Toggle grid

These are Rhino's chords. Orbit can be moved to the middle mouse button in Settings → Mouse; whichever button orbits is the one that takes the Shift, Ctrl and Alt chords, and the one that swipes.

Swipe to an axis¶

Hold Alt and flick the orbit button the way you want to go. The view turns a quarter of the way round, then settles on whichever axis is nearest, so a swipe left from Front lands on Right and a swipe down lands on Top. It is the quickest way to get somewhere in a single maximised pane, where the alternative is a function key or the View menu.

The swipe turns the camera and nothing else. Do it in a perspective pane and you get Top in perspective, with an ordinary drag to orbit back out of it. Do it in a pane that is already parallel, such as one of the four in the default layout, and you land on the whole named view: construction plane, label and all, exactly as if you had picked it from the menu.

A flick under about 12 pixels is not a swipe, so Alt and a click still does whatever it did before.

If nothing happens, check whether your desktop uses Alt and a drag to move windows: some Linux setups do, and the window manager takes the drag before Serpentine3D sees it. GNOME and current KDE use the Super key for that, so this is mostly older or hand-configured setups.

Views turn rather than cut¶

The swipe, F1 to F4, the View menu and a pane's own title menu all turn the camera to the new view over about a fifth of a second. Front and Back look identical on a symmetric model, so a cut tells you nothing about where you ended up; the motion does. Anything you do next lands it at once, so two quick presses are two turns rather than a race, and a script that sets a view and reads it back still sees the answer immediately.

Change the length, or switch it off, in your settings file:

"display": { "view_transition_ms": 180 }

Zero cuts straight there, as it did before.

Mouse chords¶

A mouse button held with modifiers can run any command. Add one in Settings → Shortcuts, or write it into your settings file:

"mouse": { "chords": { "ctrl+shift+mmb": "zoomselected" } }

The chord fires on a click, so a drag with the same keys held still orbits and pans as before. Only the middle and right buttons can be bound — the left one is busy selecting. Order and spelling don't matter: ctrl+shift+mmb, mmb+ctrl+shift and shift+ctrl+middle are one binding. Nothing is bound out of the box.

Files & editing¶

Shortcut	Action
`Ctrl`+`N` / `Ctrl`+`O` / `Ctrl`+`S`	New / Open / Save
`Ctrl`+`Z` / `Ctrl`+`Y`	Undo / Redo
`Ctrl`+`A`	Select all
`Del`	Delete selection
`Ctrl`+`P`	Export the current sheet to PDF
`Ctrl`+`,`	Settings

Selection¶

Click to select; Shift-click adds, Ctrl-click removes; click empty space to deselect.
Box selection: drag left→right for a window (fully enclosed, gold box); right→left for a crossing (anything touched, white box).
Object snaps — end, mid, center, quadrant, intersection, apparent intersection, perpendicular, nearest — toggle on the osnap bar under the command line. They keep working while a direction is held: the point lands on the locked line beside whatever the snap found.
AppInt is the crossing you can see but cannot touch: where a rafter passes over a wall in a Top view the two never meet, so Int has nothing there, and AppInt gives you the point anyway, on whichever curve is nearer the camera. It belongs to the view you are looking through, so it moves when you orbit. Off until you switch it on.

Control points & sub-objects¶

The gumball on a selected solid — The gumball: arrows move, arcs rotate, knobs scale — and ++ctrl+shift++-click a face for push/pull.

Shortcut	Action
`F10` / `F11`	Show / hide control points (curves and surfaces)
`Ctrl`+`Shift` + click	Pick a face (push/pull) or edge (fillet) of a solid
`Tab`	While a command wants a point: lock the direction you're aiming in, then type the distance. `Tab` again releases it
`Ctrl` + click	While a command wants a point: stand a vertical up from the point you clicked, then type the height (Rhino's elevator mode)
`Ctrl`+`M`	Give the viewport you're in the whole window; again puts the layout back. Double-clicking a viewport's title does the same
Arrow keys	Nudge the selection along the construction plane (`Shift` ×10, `Ctrl` ×0.1)

Command line¶

Tab completes command names, except while a command is waiting for a point, when it locks the direction instead; ↑ / ↓ recall history.
Enter on an empty line repeats the last command; Space is Enter too, as in Rhino, so one hand can stay on the mouse (while a command is asking for text, such as a layer name, Space is just a space); a right-click in the viewport is Enter as well — it runs what you've typed or repeats the last command. delete is never repeated, so a right-click after deleting something repeats whatever you were doing before it instead.
Type command options inline (cap=n) or click the chips under the prompt.
F1 opens the searchable command reference inside the app.