Table-related Functions

Everything you do to tables and memos once they exist — selecting, moving, copying, coloring, and setting what each table shows — plus the canvas controls around them.
The table and memo commands come first, then table properties, focusing on tables, indexes, auto layout, and the database vendor, and the canvas itself last: the canvas toolbar, zoom, panning, and the diff viewer.

Multiple Selection

Supports three methods:

• Ctrl + drag (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + drag (Mac)
• Ctrl + click (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + click (Mac)
• Ctrl + A or Ctrl + Alt + A (Windows/Linux), ⌘ + A or ⌘ + ⌥ + A (Mac)

Memos are selected the same way, and either select-all shortcut takes every table and memo at once.
Ctrl + A gives way to a caret, so it selects the text rather than the diagram while you are editing a cell.
A selection box marks an entity when it covers the middle of it, not when it merely touches an edge.

In a collaborative session, each participant's selection, focused cell, and selection box are drawn on the canvas in that participant's color — see Collaborative Editing.

Moving Multiple Tables

Drag any table or memo that is already part of the selection and the whole selection moves with it — no modifier needed.
Dragging something outside the selection collapses the selection onto it and moves that alone. Ctrl + drag (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + drag (Mac) keeps the selection either way.

Copying/Pasting Tables and Memos

Copies the selected tables and memos and pastes them back as new ones.
Shortcuts: Ctrl + C (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + C (Mac), Ctrl + V (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + V (Mac)

A copied table keeps its name, comment, columns, and color; a copied memo keeps its text, size, and color. A copy keeps the original name.
Indexes and relationships come along too: an index is copied whole onto the copied table, and a relationship is copied when both of the tables it joins are in the copied set. Half a relationship is dropped rather than left pointing back at the original.
The pasted copies become the new selection, and pasting the same copy again offsets it by a further 50px each time, so repeated pastes do not stack on top of one another.

When columns are selected inside a focused table, the same shortcut copies those columns instead — see Table Editing.

Duplicating Tables and Memos

Hold Alt and drag a table or memo with the left mouse button.
A translucent preview follows the pointer, and releasing the button drops the copy where the preview sits.
If what you grab is already part of a selection, the whole selection is duplicated. Otherwise the selection is replaced by the entity under the pointer.
Alt + click without moving drops the copy 50px down and to the right, stepping further whenever that spot is already taken.

A duplicate carries the same things as a paste: names, comments, columns, colors, memo sizes, and the indexes and relationships that belong entirely to what you copied.

Table and Memo Deletion

Deletes the currently selected table or memo.
Shortcuts: Ctrl + Backspace (Windows/Linux) or Ctrl + Delete (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Backspace (Mac) or ⌘ + Delete (Mac)

Table and Memo Color Specification

You can designate colors to differentiate by category.
A table wears its color down its left edge, and a memo along its top. Click that edge or strip to open the picker. The color is applied to every selected table and memo, not only the one you clicked.

Table View Options

Offers the following view options:

• Table Comment
• Column Comment
• DataType
• Default
• Not Null
• Unique
• Auto Increment
• Relationship

Cards in the Visualization tab's Flow mode do not follow these options: they use their own row display, and draw their connectors even with Relationship off.

Table Properties

Opens the property panel of the selected table. Start from the table context menu or by using the shortcut Alt + Space. It provides three tabs: Indexes, Schema SQL, and Code Generator. The panel keeps the five most recently opened tables along the top, so you can move between them without reopening it.

Focusing on Tables

Opens the Visualization tab in Flow mode, narrowed to the chosen tables and every table one relationship away from them.
Start from the table context menu with Focus on this table, or select one or more tables and press Alt + F.
When the table you right-click is one of several selected tables, the entry reads Focus on selected tables and focuses the whole selection. Right-clicking a table outside the selection focuses that table alone.
The shortcut takes the selected tables, leaves memos out, and does nothing when no table is selected.
What the narrowed view shows, and how to get back to the whole diagram, is covered in Visualization.

Indexes

Indexes are defined in the Indexes tab of the table property panel and are included in the exported Schema SQL.

The left side lists the indexes on the table. Add one with +.
Each index has a UQ toggle that makes it unique, a name field, and an x that removes it.

The right side lists the table's columns with a checkbox each. Nothing is editable until an index is selected on the left.
Tick a column to add it to the selected index, and untick it to remove it.
The columns of the selected index are listed below. Drag them by the grip handle to reorder them, and click the ASC or DESC chip on a row to flip its sort order.

Auto Layout

Arranges every table on the canvas for you.
Open Auto Layout from the canvas context menu or from quick search, and pick one of four layouts:

Layout	What it draws
Force	A simulation: relationships pull tables together, neighbors push each other apart, and overlapping tables come apart.
Flow	Left to right along the relationships, with every connector given its own point of contact on a table. It tries to keep crossings few, but can leave some that another layout would avoid.
Tree - vertical	Layered downwards: a parent table sits above the tables that carry a foreign key to it.
Tree - horizontal	The same layering, running left to right.

Force opens a preview while the layout settles, with Apply and Cancel on the notice it shows.
The preview is framed on the diagram as it stood when the layout started, so tables can move out of the frame as the layout settles. It is drawn at 70% or less, so its tables show collapsed to their name and their color edge.
Apply keeps the positions as they stand at that moment, and the layout is applied on its own once it comes to rest. Cancel or Escape leaves the diagram as it was.

The other three are worked out in one go, off the main thread, so there is nothing to watch: a notice shows while the layout is computed, and the finished arrangement is centered on what the diagram already covers. Cancel or Escape drops a layout you are no longer waiting for, and a host that runs no shared worker ends in Could not place tables — see Web Workers. A layout that has not come back within 60 seconds ends the same way.

Whichever you pick, only tables are moved; memos stay where they are. A relationship from a table to itself is ignored, and several relationships between the same two tables count once.
The result lands as a single history entry, so one undo puts every table back where it was.

Databases

Supported databases include:

• Databricks
• MSSQL
• MariaDB
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL
• Snowflake
• SQLite

These options determine the Schema SQL syntax for exporting, the DataType autocomplete, and the types that generated code and imported schemas resolve to.
Multi-word type names such as TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE and INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND are kept intact when Schema SQL is imported, argument list included.

Canvas Toolbar

A small toolbar floats over the middle of the bottom edge of the canvas, holding the tools that act on the canvas itself:

• The hand and the pointer. The pointer is the default; the hand turns every drag into a pan, over tables as well as empty space. Space switches between them.
• The zoom: Zoom out, the current zoom as a percentage, and Zoom in. The two buttons step the zoom the same way the zoom shortcuts do.
• The four relationship notations, the same four you start a relationship with — see Editing Start. Picking one switches back to the pointer, since a relationship is drawn by clicking two tables.
• Zen mode, Alt + Z, which clears everything but the canvas and this toolbar. Alt + Z again, or the button, brings the rest back.
• The Go to content compass, which joins the end of the toolbar only while no table or memo is on screen — see Getting Around the Canvas.

Every button with a shortcut names it in its tooltip.
The toolbar steps aside while the Force Auto Layout preview, table properties, time travel, or the diff viewer is open, and comes back once it closes.

Zoom In/Out

Zooms with Ctrl + Wheel (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Wheel (Mac). The wheel alone pans the canvas.
A trackpad pinch zooms too, about the point you pinch at, and so do two fingers on a touch screen, which also pan as they move.
Shortcuts: Ctrl + Plus (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Plus (Mac), Ctrl + Minus (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Minus (Mac)
Ctrl + 0 (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + 0 (Mac) goes straight back to 100%, keeping the middle of the screen where it is.

The Zoom out and Zoom in buttons on the canvas toolbar step the zoom like the Minus and Plus shortcuts: each press moves it 4 percentage points, keeping the middle of the screen where it is. The percentage between them shows the current zoom.

Zoom ranges from 10% to 150%.
At 70% and below, tables collapse to their name and their color edge, and cell editing, the cell shortcuts, and copy and paste stop working until you zoom back in.

The same three shortcuts also zoom the Visualization tab, in Graph and Flow mode alike, each mode within its own range — see Visualization.

Getting Around the Canvas

The canvas has no edges and no size to set. Tables and memos sit wherever you put them, and everything below describes the diagram rather than a fixed page.

Drag an empty area of the canvas to pan, or switch to the hand tool with Space and drag anywhere, including over a table. The wheel pans too, and Shift + Wheel pans sideways.
Panning has no bounds: the wheel, a drag, and the hand tool carry the view as far as you move it, past the tables on any side.

The minimap in the top-right corner maps the diagram with a screen's worth of room on every side of it, the reach of the scrollbars, snapped outward to a coarse grid, so the further you zoom out, the smaller the diagram sits in it. Click it to move the view to that point, or drag the viewport rectangle to pan. As you zoom out, the viewport rectangle grows to cover more of the map.
The scrollbars along the right and bottom edges describe the same travel, which runs from the diagram sitting just off one side of the screen to just off the other, so it is at least a screen longer than the diagram as drawn, and longer still while the view stands past it. Outside zen mode, both scrollbars show whenever the document holds a table or memo, even when all of it fits on screen; only an empty document shows neither, and no minimap.
Dragging a scrollbar thumb or the minimap's viewport rectangle is the one pan that stops: it goes no further than the tables just off screen, or than where the drag started if that was further out.

If a pan leaves no table or memo on screen, a Go to content compass joins the end of the canvas toolbar, with an arrow at the nearest one and how far away it is. Click it to centre that entity without changing the zoom.

Diff Viewer

You can compare previously saved documents with the current document.
Choose Diff Viewer from the canvas context menu and pick a .json document you exported earlier.

The view opens over the canvas: what changed on the left, then the saved document and the current one side by side.
Tables and columns are matched by name. A cell whose value differs between the two is tinted on both sides, red in the saved document and green in the current one, so a table or column found on one side only is tinted throughout.
Each side pans with the wheel or by dragging an empty area, and zooms with Ctrl + Wheel (Windows/Linux), ⌘ + Wheel (Mac), or a pinch. At 70% and below its tables collapse as they do on the canvas, and the tint is not shown.
Both sides are read-only, so nothing in your document is modified. Close the view with the Close button on the notice it opens with, or with Escape.