A mouse wheel zooms, the CAD convention. A two-finger drag on a trackpad pans the drawing with your fingers. A pinch, and ⌘/ctrl
- scroll, always zoom. F — the Zoom to fit (F) button in the toolbar — frames the whole drawing.
The same rules apply in the plan and in the elevation panes.
Zooming without a wheel
Under the fit button in the toolbar is a − + pair. Each click is a quarter step about the middle of the drawing area — three of them roughly double or halve the scale. It is the answer when there is no wheel to spin (a trackpad set to pan, a touchscreen, a mouse with a dead scroll), and it is repeatable where a gesture is not, since every click is the same step. The percentage in the bottom-right corner of the drawing is the live zoom; each half greys out at its end of the range, the same limits the wheel stops at.
The zoom buttons and the fit button drive the plan, so they stand down in the 3D and elevation views, which navigate themselves.
When it guesses your device wrongly
The two devices arrive through the same browser event, and the size of the scroll says nothing about which one it was: macOS runs a mouse wheel through the same accelerated pipeline as the trackpad, so a slow notch looks exactly like fingers. Gridsnap therefore reads the evidence a wheel cannot fake — a sideways component, or a fractional step — and defaults to zooming otherwise.
A high-resolution mouse can still report like a trackpad. If yours does, or you simply prefer the other behaviour, open the ⚙ in the top bar and set Navigation (this device) → Scrolling:
| Option | What plain scrolling does |
|---|---|
| Auto (detect device) | A mouse wheel zooms, a two-finger drag pans. The default. |
| Always zoom | Every scroll zooms. |
| Always pan | Every scroll pans. |
Pinch and ⌘/ctrl + scroll zoom in all three.
This setting belongs to the browser you are sitting at, not to the plan: which pointing device is on the desk is not a property of the drawing, so it never travels with the file and never follows you to another machine.
What this doesn’t do
- No middle-mouse pan. Panning is the trackpad drag, the scroll setting above, or the fit button. The toolbar zooms, but nothing there pans.
- The browser will not page-zoom under a pinch. That is deliberate — a pinch over the drawing zooms the drawing, not the window.
Next
Keyboard shortcuts for the rest of the navigation keys, and snapping, whose tolerances are in screen pixels — which is why they feel the same however far you have zoomed.