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Sketch Keyboard Shortcuts

Enhancing your flow, one keystroke at a time

Jean-Marc Denis
.Sketch App
Published in
3 min readOct 14, 2013

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As a Mac OS user, you probably already know how to copy and paste. I’ll show you some more advanced shortcuts that I use a lot that maybe you’re not aware of. All of them are huge time savers.

To make myself adapt to the shortcut, I tend to learn it immediately — as soon as I navigate through a menu or try to find the right icon. It’s a bit painful, but it’s worth it when you think about how many times you’ll perform these actions everyday.

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Basics and/or hidden

Z Zoom tool (hold down and click or drag an area)

Escape Exit every mode, tool, selection

Space Hand Tool

Enter Edit currently selected layer

Tab Cycle through layers in the current group (useful when renaming)

Shift Tab Reverse cycle

⌥ drag duplicate a layer

⌥ hover display distance between other layers

⌥ resize resize from the center

shift resize resize and preserve aspect ratio

⌥ ⌘ click toogle menu with layers under the mouse

hold ⌘ and point select layers inside non-click-through groups

⌘ R rename layers or artboards

⌘ Shift L lock or unlock layers

⌘ Shift H hide or show layers

↑ ↓ ← → move

⌘ ↑ ↓ ← → resize

↑ ↓ change field values

holding shift while moving, resizing, changing field values will perform the action by 10px increments instead of 1px

File

shift ⌘ E Export mode

Edit

⌥ ⌘ C Copy style

⌥ ⌘ V Paste style

control C Color picker

shift ⌘ R Rotate layer

hold ⌘ while using resize handles Rotate layer

Insert

V Vector point

R Rectangle

O Oval

U Rounded Rectangle

T Text

Arrange

⌘ F Find layer

View

⌘ + Zoom in

⌘ - Zoom out

⌘ 1 Center canvas

⌘ 2 Zoom selection

control R Toggle Rulers

control G Toggle Grid

control P Toggle Pixel to Vector

control L Toggle alignment guides

Don’t forget!

  • You can do mathematical operations in numeric fields
  • Double-click on rulers to add manual guides
  • Edit > Set Style as Default can be very handy
  • Edit > Scale unlike manual resizing, adjusts everything (font sizes, line weights, blendings, etc.)
  • You can use Make Grid on a single shape or folder to generate copies

Follow me on Twitter to get more tips! @jm_denis

Update 2013/11/05

Copy a shape style with multiple fills to a text layer to remove the one fill limitation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXjaluQVGG0

Hold the ‘A’ key to prevent Sketch from selecting another layer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD72xy6Ppmo

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Jean-Marc Denis
.Sketch App

Product design manager at Facebook Messenger. Former Google Daydream, Inbox, Gmail and Sparrow.