Moving around
Mouse, the orientation gizmo, and a camera that remembers where you left it.
The 3D view is flown, not scrolled. Three mouse gestures cover almost everything, and there's a dial in the corner for when you've tumbled the scene sideways and want your bearings back.
The mouse#
| Gesture | What happens |
|---|---|
| Left-drag on empty space | Tumble the whole scene |
| Scroll wheel or middle-drag | Zoom in and out |
| Right-drag on empty space | Pan |
| Left-drag on a node | Move that node |
| Hover a node | Its name and counts, in a small tooltip |
| Left-click a node | Fly to it, and open its card |
| Left-click empty space | Let go of whatever was focused |
The tumble is free rotation — there's no fixed "up". You can roll the project onto its side and keep going. That's what the gizmo is for when you want out.
There are no keyboard shortcuts for flying the camera — no arrow-key orbit, no numpad views. The mouse and the gizmo are the two instruments.
Clicking a node#
A click does three things at once, and it's worth knowing all three so none of them surprise you.
The camera flies to it — about 800 milliseconds, parking slightly below the node and looking up at it. The framing is deliberate: you arrive under the thing you clicked, so its wires spread above you rather than crossing your view.
A glass card opens on it, and the node's dependencies light up. Both are covered in Clicking a node.
Folders you'd wandered into fold shut. If you click something that has nothing to do with the folders you currently have open, the scene tidies itself back down. Leave a folder, and the scene folds behind you. It keeps a long exploration from silting up into an unreadable cloud.
Touching the camera yourself — any tumble, zoom or pan with the mouse on the scene — releases the focus and closes the card. The view assumes that if you've taken the controls, you're done looking at that one thing.
Moving the camera with the gizmo doesn't count. You can orbit and zoom from the dial with a card open and it stays open — useful when you want to look at a focused node from another angle without losing it.
The orientation gizmo#
A small frosted dial with three coloured balls — X red, Y green, Z blue — that turn as the camera turns. It's the compass. You'll find it near the bottom of the window, and in runs mode it moves up beside the command bar.
- Tap a ball to snap the camera down that axis. Tap the same ball again to flip to the opposite side.
- Drag the dial to orbit. Let go while moving and it keeps gliding, then settles.
- Wheel over the dial to zoom without leaving it.
Underneath are three buttons: Zoom in (hold), Overview (¾ angle), and Zoom out (hold). The zoom buttons keep going while held. The middle one is the reset you'll actually use — it frames the entire current scene at a three-quarter angle, whatever mess you've made of the camera.
Hide or show the gizmo from the menu bar: View → Toggle Gizmo, or Ctrl+Shift+G (Cmd+Shift+G on macOS). It's rebindable in Settings → Keybindings under Toggle Gizmo. It starts visible every time you launch — its state isn't remembered.
The camera remembers#
Every folder level keeps its own camera. Where you were standing, and what you were looking at, saved per folder, per project — and it survives closing the tab, closing the project, and restarting Semantix.
You don't save it. It's written whenever you finish a camera move.
The practical effect: you come back to a folder you were working in last week and the view is framed the way you left it. Not the default overview — your angle.
Moving nodes#
Drag a node and the rest of the scene gets out of the way: its own wires stay lit and flowing, its immediate neighbours glow, and everything unconnected fades down to almost nothing. It's the fastest way to answer "what is this thing actually touching" — grab it and look at what stayed bright.
Positions are saved as you arrange them, per folder level, per project, on the same terms as the camera.
Note
There's an inconsistency here worth knowing rather than being confused by. In a folder you're arranging for the first time, a dropped node drifts back toward where the layout physics wants it. In a folder with a saved layout, a dropped node stays exactly where you put it.
There is also no "reset layout" command. A hand-arranged folder stays hand-arranged.
Getting to a file from here#
Clicking a node doesn't open it — it focuses it. To actually open a file, use the drill button on its card, covered in Clicking a node. Drilling a file opens it in the code editor in a new tab; drilling a folder opens that folder as its own 3D tab.
The file explorer works alongside it rather than steering it. Clicking a folder in the tree takes the current tab to that folder's own 3D view; clicking a file turns the tab into the code editor. Neither one flies the camera around the scene you were in — they change what the tab is looking at.