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Tips and shortcuts

Small UX details that are easy to miss but pay off once you know them.

Tooltips

Most icon-only controls have descriptive tooltips. To keep the UI quiet during normal use, tooltips follow two rules:

  • 400 ms hover delay before they appear, so glancing past a control does not flash a tooltip.
  • 2-second auto-hide while the cursor is still over the control, so the tooltip does not block what you are trying to read underneath.

Move off the control and back on to bring the tooltip back.

Double-click to zoom to bounds

Anywhere a layer or data source has a known bounding box (COG, WMS layer, GeoJSON, FlatGeoBuf, S3 object, STAC item), double-click the move controls beside it to zoom the embedded preview straight to that extent — no manual pan/zoom required.

This is the same gesture used in:

  • The GE Preview tab when iterating on layer styling.
  • The STAC browser item list.
  • The S3 browser when previewing a COG.

Compact move controls

The up / down / pin buttons next to layers and groups stack vertically in the compact layout to keep wide cards readable on smaller windows. The button hit area stays the same — only the visual stack changes — so muscle memory carries over from the spacious layout.

Unsaved changes guard

The builder tracks an isDirty flag on every editor dialog. If you try to:

  • Close a dialog with unsaved edits,
  • Switch tabs while an editor is dirty,
  • Load a different config without exporting first,

you will see a confirmation prompt rather than losing the work silently. Cancel the prompt to return to the editor; Discard to throw the edits away and continue.

Keyboard

The builder relies on standard browser keyboard behaviour rather than custom shortcuts:

Key Effect
Tab / Shift+Tab Move between form fields and buttons.
Enter Submit a focused form / confirm a dialog's primary button.
Esc Close the topmost dialog or popover.
Ctrl/Cmd+F Browser search — works against the JSON Config tab to find a key fast.

Working with long URLs

Service URLs, S3 paths, and STAC self-links are often very long. The UI:

  • Truncates the middle of the URL with an ellipsis,
  • Shows the full URL on hover,
  • Clicks through to the original resource (or to an external STAC browser, where applicable).

See the relevant signed URL handling notes if you are pasting pre-signed S3 URLs.