Mouse navigation

The FreeCAD mouse model consists of the commands used to visually navigate the 3D space and interact with the objects displayed. FreeCAD supports multiple mouse model navigation styles. The default navigation style is referred to as "CAD Navigation," and is very simple and practical, but FreeCAD also provides alternative navigation styles, that you can choose according to your preferences.

Navigation
The object handling is common to all workbenches. The following mouse gestures can be used to control the object position and view according to which Navigation style is selected.

There are two ways to change the navigation style:


 * In the Preferences Editor, Display section, 3D View tab;
 * By right-clicking in empty space in the 3D view area, then selecting Navigation style in the contextual menu.

CAD Navigation (default)
This is the default navigation style and allows the user a simple control of the view, and does not require the use of keyboard keys except to make multi-selections.

OpenInventor Navigation
In OpenInventor (formerly Inventor) Navigation, modeled after Open Inventor (not to be confused with Autodesk Inventor), there is no mouse-only selection. In order to select objects, you must hold down the key.

Blender Navigation
The Blender Navigation was modeled after Blender. Previously there was no mouse-only panning, and it required use of the key to pan the view. This changed in 2016 with a feature-addition. In order to pan the view, you can now press both left and right mouse buttons and drag in the view.

Touchpad Navigation
In Touchpad Navigation, neither panning, nor zooming, nor rotating the view, are mouse-only (or touchpad-only) operations.

Gesture Navigation (v0.16)
This navigation style was tailored for usability with touchscreen and pen, but is very usable with mouse too.

Maya-Gesture Navigation
In Maya-Gesture Navigation, all view movements are activated pressing and a mouse button, so that it will be needed to have a 3 button mouse in order to correctly use this navigation mode. Alternately it's possible to use gestures as this mode was been developed over the normal Gesture Navigation mode.

Simple selection
Objects can be selected by a click with the left mouse button either by clicking on the object in the 3D-view or by selecting it in the tree view.

Preselection
There is also a Preselection mechanism that highlights objects and displays information before selection by just hovering the mouse over the objects. If you don't like this behaviour or you have a slow machine, you can switch preselection off in the preferences.

Manipulating Objects
FreeCAD offers manipulators that are handles that can be used to modify an object's appearance, shape, or other parameters.

The clipping plane is an example of an object with manipulators. A clipping plane can be activated with the View→Clipping Plane menu

Hardware support
FreeCAD also supports some 3D input devices.

Mac OS X Issues
Recently we got reports on the forum from Mac users that those mouse button and key combination do not work as expected. Unfortunately, none of the developers owns a Mac, neither do the other regular contributors. We need your help to determine which mouse buttons and key combination work so we can update this wiki.