Hi folks
I am learning to use Krita on a Surface Book 2 computer with the keyboard folded underneath, which makes the keyboard inaccessible. Folding gives easier access to the drawing surface. However Krita instructions and discussions all talk about keyboard commands to do most tasks. Is there a table of keyboard commands and their equivalent drawing pen based commands?
Thanks
There aren’t many you can do with only a pen by default. Pretty much all you can do is panning (middle mouse button) and do some context depending right click actions (when you have at least two side buttons on your pen).
You can do more with the pen, like zooming, rotating, change brush size but they rely on additional modifier keys like shift, control or alt in addition to the pen buttons. All of the actions are of course doable via buttons on the UI, in Menus or Dockers but accessing them just with pen buttons comes down to the number of buttons on your pen.
This isn’t even exklusive to Krita, most painting software relies a lot on keyboard shortcuts. Since space on desks is limited and not anyone can put a whole keyboard on it, or take it with them, a lot of artists use a small peripheral they keep in their other hand while holding a pen in their dominant hand. Comon examples include, but aren’t limited to: a Wacom Remote, a mini keyboard that’s roughly the size of a numpad, stream deck or a repurposed game controller like a wiimote or switch nunchuck (basically every Bluetooth or USB device that has freely mappable buttons will do). Then you can set the most used shortcuts on the remote e.g. undo, redo, eraser mode or the modifier keys.
Krita doesn’t have any pen gestures I’m aware of.
Thank you for the helpful reply. Now that you point it out I can see why trying to load myriad functions into two or three pen buttons is unrealistic.
What about the menu functions and other choices that can be selected suing the pen? Do all the keyboard equivalents map onto functions on menus and elsewhere that can be accessed suing the pen, and is there a list of them somewhere?
Thanks
Pretty much every function is available as a button on a toolbar, the tool options docker or the menus
and if not you can add them by clicking on Settings › Configure Toolbars for more or less easy access with the pen. There is a list of all available actions that can be added to the toolbars. Actually most actions don’t even have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them because they are just to many. So you will even find actions that have no shortcuts by default.
I have the same problem and I started to develop a Python plugin for a quick pen-friendly menu. But it’s not ready yet.
You can however search on this forum for “Kanvas Buddy”, it’s a good plugin (and already usable) too.
Have you tried the pie menu plugin? With a single key you can have a bunch of commands.
You can set up a keyboard command to your pen and activate the menu of the plugin … With the pen.
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Not sure how to set up a keyboard command activated by the pen. The menu - settings - configure Krita- keyboard shortcuts only accepts keyboard commands. I tried using the pen buttons but they were not recognized.
It would be great if the Pie Menu could be opened with the pen alone.
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