draw.io shortcuts
As new features are added to draw.io and the menu is refined, new keyboard shortcuts are also built into the editor. Here are some of the new and useful shortcuts for diagramming in draw.io.
There are many combination mouse plus keyboard shortcuts in draw.io that will speed up your drawing. You can select and deselect multiple shapes, resize grouped shapes in various ways, connect and clone shapes quickly.
Keyboard shortcuts in draw.io (and the draw.io apps developed by JGraph) enable you work with shapes and connectors in your diagrams both easier and faster. There are a number of ways you can select shapes and connectors with the keyboard, or when holding down a key and using the mouse.
The double click behaviour in draw.io has been updated in version 13.4.2 to be more convenient. Now, when you double click on the blank drawing canvas, you can quickly add a shape or text from the selector to your diagram.
There are many keyboard shortcuts you can use when working with shapes from the shape libraries on the left of the drawing canvas in draw.io.
Quickly move an entire area of your diagram: hold down the Alt, Ctrl and Shift keys, then click on a blank section of the drawing canvas and drag to move it. You’ll see guide lines appear to show you the origin and displacement of the area you are moving.
When you drag a selection box around too many shapes, you can either do it again to include the shapes you wanted to select, or use hold down Alt+Shift and drag a deselection box around those shapes that you don’t want to include in your selection.
You can quickly build flow charts, mind maps or tree diagrams using shortcut key combinations.
When you work with container shapes, dropping a shape over that container inserts that shape into that container. While this is useful for adding steps to a flow chart inside a flow lane (e.g. using the flow layout shape), you may not necessarily want to add the shape for the person responsible into the flow lane container, but instead overlay it.
If you want to delete a shape and all of the connections to and from that shape, you can do that with a keyboard + toolbar shortcut.