Clicking on empty canvas to open documents

William Kansepa

In Adobe Illustrator and Affinity you can double-click on an empty canvas to open files.
I would love to see this nifty option of opening files also introduced in VS.

Boldline

@William-Kansepa that's interesting, I didn't even realize that was a feature in Illustrator or Affinity. It is a handy little thing if no files are open

VectorStyler

@William-Kansepa I will add this to the backlog.
But the way currently works (in Affinity) is to double click when all documents are closed.
In the latest Illustrator, this does not work anymore.

William Kansepa

@VectorStyler said in Clicking on empty canvas to open documents:

In the latest Illustrator, this does not work anymore.

It's still working if you disable "Show The Home Screen When No Documents Are Open" in the Preferences dialog.

Ingolf

It’s actually a great idea; I didn’t realise it was implemented in any apps yet. It moves past that old-school "pulling levers on a factory machine" style of usability as the only way of doing things.

I’ve looked into it briefly; it’s not (yet) a macOS system default as such, but it’s definitely become the gold standard for Mac apps recently. Apple’s been pushing this "empty state" logic in their latest frameworks, so while you have to code the double-click interaction yourself, it’s what users may expect from a modern macOS app soon.

For instance, it’s already implemented in Apple’s new Pages, Numbers, and so on. I assume it makes sense given all the touch devices currently out there and those yet to come.

I do wonder, though, how on earth anyone is supposed to discover it exists. But then again, I know I grew up with that old-timer menu loyalty, whereas the coming generations will be interacting with their software physically and verbally.

Note: Canva is currently rolling out AI integration in Affinity and Canva, so you can, for example, tell it to "rename all layers" and the day is fast approaching where AI can rename every layer based on a qualified guess of the content (and I'll use THAT feature instantly).

Classic clicking and menus might soon be rebranded as "Classic Architecture Mode."