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.

Inventor Navigation
In 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
In Blender Navigation, modeled after Blender, there is no mouse-only panning. In order to pan the view, you must hold down the key.

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

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 a good example of an object with manipulators. A clipping plane can be activated with the View→Clipping Plane menu. After activation the clipping plane object appears and shows seven obvious manipulators as little boxes: One on each end of its three coordinate axes and one on the center of the plane normal axis. There are four more that are not as obvious: The plane itself and the thin part of the three axis objects.


 * Scaling: To scale the object click with the left mouse button on the box manipulators at the end of the axes and pull them back and forth. Depending on the object the manipulators work independently or synchronously.
 * Out of plane shifting: To shift the object along its normal vector, pull the long box on the center of an axis with the left mouse button. For the clipping plane there is only one manipulator along the normal vector.
 * In plane shifting: To move the center of the clipping plane, click on the plane object and pull it to the desired location.
 * Rotation: Clicking on the thin part of the axes puts the manipulator in rotation mode.

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.