The one-page keyboard reference for Chroma, covering the menu shortcut to open the window and the per-tab keys that speed up the repeated swatch and stop operations.
One reference page for every keyboard shortcut in Scylla Chroma. The per-tab pages list shortcuts in their own context; this page collects them all into one searchable table so the keys do not have to be hunted across pages.
Summary
Chroma is mostly mouse-driven (it is a color tool, and color picking is inherently a pointing-and-clicking activity), but a handful of keyboard shortcuts make repeated operations significantly faster. Cycling through palette swatches with arrow keys when reviewing a 64-entry palette. Pixel-precise sampling with arrow-key cursor nudging when grabbing colors from a tightly-packed sprite. Committing an eyedropper pick with Space when the click target is small enough that the OS click would land off-target. None of these are essential, but each one removes friction from a common workflow.
The shortcuts are grouped below by where they apply: globally, in the eyedropper overlay, on the Palette Editor tab, on the Gradient Editor tab, on the Image Sampler tab. The Color Editor tab, the Theory tab, the Accessibility tab, the Mixer tab, the Compare tab, the Recolor tab, and the Library sidebar do not have dedicated keyboard shortcuts beyond Unity’s standard text-field navigation.
Global
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Cmd+Shift+K (macOS) / Ctrl+Shift+K (Windows, Linux) | Open the Chroma window from anywhere in the Unity editor. If the window is already open, brings it to focus. |
| Cmd/Ctrl+Z | Undo the most recent action across any Chroma tab. |
| Cmd/Ctrl+Y (Windows, Linux) / Cmd+Shift+Z (macOS) | Redo the most recently undone action. |
The Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K binding is registered by ChromaMenuItems against the Scylla > Tools > Chroma… menu entry. The Undo / Redo bindings are Unity’s standard editor undo system; every Chroma edit (swatch add, gradient stop move, palette sort, etc.) records as a discrete Undo step.
Screen eyedropper
The eyedropper is the magnifier-overlay color picker reachable from the toolbar’s eyedropper button or from any tab’s color picker.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Space, Return, Keypad Enter | Commit the pick at the magnifier crosshair position. |
| Escape | Cancel the pick without sampling. |
| Mouse click | Commit the pick at the OS cursor position (which may differ from the magnifier crosshair). |
Using Space / Return to commit rather than mouse-click is the right move when the target pixel is small enough that mouse-click precision is unreliable; the keyboard commit samples at the magnifier’s crosshair pixel exactly.
Color tab
The Color tab has no dedicated keyboard shortcuts beyond Unity’s standard text-field bindings (Enter / Tab to commit, Escape to revert).
For named-color search via the Name field, type a color name and the results update live on every keystroke.
Palette tab
The Palette tab’s keyboard handlers apply to the swatch grid (and to the list view by extension). They activate when the swatch grid has focus and no inline text field is being edited.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Left | Cycle the selection one swatch to the left (wraps from the first swatch to the last). |
| Right | Cycle the selection one swatch to the right (wraps from the last swatch to the first). |
| Home | Jump the selection to the first swatch. |
| End | Jump the selection to the last swatch. |
| Delete / Backspace | Remove the current selection (single or multi). |
| Cmd/Ctrl+A | Select all swatches. |
| Double-click Name cell (List view) | Begin inline editing of the swatch name. |
| Enter / Keypad Enter (List view, Name field open) | Commit the inline name edit. |
| Escape (List view, Name field open) | Cancel the inline name edit. |
| Double-click swatch | Load the swatch’s color into the active color, propagating to every other tab. |
| Shift+Click | Extend the selection to a contiguous range from the previous selection to the clicked swatch. |
| Cmd/Ctrl+Click | Toggle individual swatches in and out of the selection. |
The arrow-key cycling honours the on-asset order (not the sort-display order), so cycling through a sorted palette walks the underlying array. This is rarely meaningful in practice; arrow navigation works as expected regardless of the view mode.
Gradient tab
The Gradient tab’s keyboard handlers apply to whichever stop is currently selected. Most of the editing happens through the Stop Inspector below the bar, so the keyboard set is small.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Delete / Backspace | Remove the currently selected stop. Ignored while a text or number field is being edited, so typing isn’t interrupted. |
| Enter / Tab (in Name, Description, Tags text fields) | Commit the field’s edited value (also fires on focus-loss). |
| Escape (in Name, Description, Tags text fields) | Revert the field’s value to the pre-edit state. |
| Double-click on the bar | Insert a new color stop (on the main bar) or alpha stop (on the alpha bar) at the cursor offset, auto-selected. |
| Drag stop handle vertically off the rail | Delete the stop. The threshold is about 40 pixels above or below the handle’s resting line. |
Stop positions are edited via the Position field in the Stop Inspector or the Position column in the list view, not by dragging the handle horizontally on the bar; the bar handles are intentionally not horizontal-drag enabled, mirroring Photoshop’s gradient editor. Position and Midpoint fields in the list view use delayed-commit semantics, so values commit only on Enter / Tab / focus-loss, not on every keystroke (this prevents intermediate parses like 0. while typing 0.5 from re-sorting the list mid-keystroke).
Image Sampler tab
The Image Sampler tab’s keyboard handlers apply when an image is loaded and the magnifier overlay is visible (the magnifier is shown in Point mode by default, and surfaces in the other modes too as the cursor moves).
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Left | Nudge the virtual cursor one pixel to the left. |
| Right | Nudge the virtual cursor one pixel to the right. |
| Up | Nudge the virtual cursor one pixel up. |
| Down | Nudge the virtual cursor one pixel down. |
| Space, Return, Keypad Enter | Sample the pixel at the virtual cursor position and load it as the active color. |
| Click on image | Sample at the OS cursor position (Point mode) or anchor the drag (Average, Gradient, Trace modes). |
| Drag on image | Define the rectangle (Average), trace the path (Gradient, Trace). |
| Mouse-release on image | Commit the rectangle average (Average) or finalise into a new ColorGradientAsset (Gradient, Trace). |
The virtual cursor and the OS cursor are distinct. Arrow-key nudging moves the virtual cursor independently of the OS cursor; the magnifier follows the virtual cursor. Space / Return commits at the virtual cursor; mouse-click commits at the OS cursor. The distinction matters when the target pixel is one or two pixels wide and reliable mouse positioning is difficult.
Tabs without dedicated shortcuts
The following tabs and panels do not register dedicated keyboard shortcuts:
- Theory tab. All interactions are mouse-driven (harmony wheel drag, Send to Palette / Create Gradient buttons).
- Accessibility tab. All interactions are picker fields and dropdowns.
- Mixer tab. Two pickers and a ratio slider; no keyboard shortcuts beyond Unity’s standard slider keys (Left / Right to nudge a focused slider).
- Compare tab. Two
ObjectFieldslots only. - Recolor tab. Three slots and a button.
- Library sidebar. Standard
MultiColumnListViewnavigation (Up / Down to walk the list, Enter to activate, Shift / Cmd+Click for selection extension).
For all of these, Unity’s default focus and field bindings apply.
Notes
- Shortcut conflicts. Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K is registered globally and may conflict with project-specific bindings or with other Unity packages. To rebind, edit the
MENU_CHROMAconstant inChromaMenuItems.cs(the%#ksuffix is Unity’s menu-shortcut notation:%is Cmd/Ctrl,#is Shift, the letter is the key). - Text-field bindings. Standard Unity text-field bindings apply inside every
TextFieldandIntegerFieldandFloatFieldin Chroma: Enter / Tab to commit, Escape to revert, Cmd/Ctrl+A to select all, Cmd/Ctrl+C / V to copy / paste. - Drag modifiers. Holding Shift during a drag is reserved by some tools (e.g. the Palette tab’s Shift+Click Add for bulk-add, the Shift+Click New to unload). These are click modifiers, not drag modifiers; there is no Shift-drag behaviour in Chroma.
- OS-specific notation. Throughout this page, Cmd/Ctrl means Cmd on macOS, Ctrl on Windows and Linux. Unity translates the
%notation accordingly.