Tools
Every tool Brilliant gives you, what it does, and the one-key shortcut that gets you there. The tool switcher lives at the left end of the bottom toolbar. Click a tool, or press its shortcut. After you draw, Brilliant drops you back to the Move tool automatically, so you rarely need to reach for it.
Press V any time to return to Move, or Esc to bail out of whatever you are doing.
Selecting and moving
Move (V): the default tool. Click to select, drag to move, drag a handle to resize.
Scale (K): a toggle layered on top of Move. In Scale mode, dragging a handle scales the whole element, including stroke weight, corner radius, and text size, instead of just stretching its box. Press K again to switch back.
Hand (H): pan the canvas by dragging. You usually will not need it, since holding Space pans with any tool active.
Drawing shapes
Rectangle (R): draw a filled rectangle. Press ⇧R for an outline-only version (a stroke, no fill).
Circle (O): draw a filled ellipse. ⇧O gives you the outline-only version.
Line (L): draw a straight line.
Arrow (⇧L): a line with an arrowhead.
Frame (F): draw a frame, Brilliant's container element. Frames hold and clip other elements and power auto layout. See Frames and auto layout.
Text (T): click to place a text cursor and start typing. See Text.
Drawing paths
Pen (P): click to drop precise nodes, or click and drag to pull out curve handles. The pen is how you draw exact vector paths.
Pencil (⇧P): draw a freehand path that Brilliant smooths into a vector as you go.
Both feed into vector editing, covered in Vectors.
Capturing the screen
Snip (S): drag a rectangle anywhere on screen to grab that region as an image element on the canvas. Snip is macOS only.
Modifiers while you draw
These hold-keys work across the drawing tools:
Constrain (Shift): hold Shift while drawing. Rectangle and Frame snap to a square, Circle to a perfect circle, and Line, Arrow, and Pencil snap to 45-degree angles. On the pen, Shift constrains node placement and handles to 15-degree steps.
Reposition mid-draw (Space): hold Space while dragging out a shape to slide the whole in-progress shape to a new spot, then release to keep sizing.
Independent pen handles (Option): hold Option while dragging a pen handle to break it away from its mirror, so the two sides of a node curve independently.
Combining and converting shapes
These live in the right-click context menu (and have shortcuts once you know them). Select the elements first.
Boolean operations: select two or more elements, right-click, and open the Boolean submenu for Union, Subtract, Intersect, and Exclude. The shortcuts are ⌥⇧U (Union), ⌥⇧S (Subtract), ⌥⇧I (Intersect), and ⌥⇧E (Exclude). Booleans stay live, so you can still edit the shapes inside them.
Mask: select two or more elements and choose Use as Mask (⌘⌃M). The topmost element becomes the clip shape for the rest. More in Frames and auto layout.
Flatten (⌘Enter): merge the selection into a single vector path.
Outline Text (⌘⌃O): convert selected text into editable vector outlines, one path per glyph. See Text.
Platform notes
Shortcuts here show the macOS chords. On Windows and Linux, ⌘ becomes Ctrl. Snip (screen capture) is macOS only. Outline Text works everywhere, but on Windows its default chord is unbound to avoid a conflict, so reach it from the context menu or the command palette.