Horizontal Toolbar: Flip It, Drag It, Size With Your Keyboard

How to flip the toolbar sideways

Press and hold the collapse button — the arrow at the very top of the toolbar — for about half a second. A small toast confirms “Toolbar: horizontal” and the bar flips into a sideways strip. Hold the same button again to flip back to vertical. Nothing else changes: your drawing, your page and your tools stay exactly as they were.

A quick tap still does what it always did: it collapses the toolbar down to a single button. The difference is only in how long you hold — tap to collapse, hold to flip. I made the hold deliberately short (about half a second) so it feels instant, but long enough that a normal tap never flips by accident.

How to drag it anywhere

In either orientation, grab the top row of the toolbar — the row with the collapse and theme buttons — and drag. The toolbar follows your pointer and stays inside the screen, so it can never get lost off an edge. Park it at the bottom like a drawing dock, hug it to the right edge, or float it near your hand.

Dragging from the collapse or theme button itself is safe: if you drag, the button's tap action does not fire, so you will never toggle the theme or collapse the bar by accident while moving it. The drag works with a mouse and with touch, so tablet users get the same freedom.

What the horizontal layout looks like

Sideways, the sections run in one row: History on the left end, Page on the right edge, with Tools, Color and Size between them. The size slider turns horizontal too, so it reads naturally in the strip. If the strip is wider than your screen, the little chevrons at the ends scroll it left and right — they point sideways in horizontal mode, so their direction always matches what they do.

Collapsing still works sideways: a quick tap hides every section and leaves just the collapse button, so you get the full canvas back in one tap.

Size shortcuts: = and -

The toolbar's + and − buttons now have keyboard twins: press = to grow your brush by 1 point, and - to shrink it by 1 point. No Shift needed — the plain = key grows, because the + key would need Shift held down. A small popup shows the new size, and the change saves with your canvas exactly like the on-screen buttons do.

The on-screen buttons still step by half a point and repeat while held, for fine adjustment. The keyboard keys step by a full point, which is the quickest way to jump sizes mid-drawing — tap = a few times for a thick outline, tap - a few times for fine detail, without ever leaving the canvas.

Zoom shortcuts: [ and ]

The same idea applies to zoom: press ] to zoom in and [ to zoom out, about 10% per press, centered on the canvas. No Shift, no Ctrl — just the bracket keys. Like the size keys, they stay off while the text tool is active, so brackets you type stay brackets.

Why I made it this way

On a wide monitor, a vertical strip wastes the best screen real estate — the bottom edge — and on a tablet, a fixed left strip is often the farthest place from your drawing hand. A toolbar you can flip and park puts the tools where your hand already is. Teachers projecting a lesson can dock it along the bottom, out of the drawing area; kids on tablets can slide it to the side they draw from. Small freedom, but it is the kind you notice every single session.

It remembers where you left it

The orientation and the position are saved in your browser. Flip to horizontal, drag the bar to the bottom, close the tab — when you come back, the toolbar is still horizontal at the bottom. There is nothing to re-set, and nothing to configure.

Frequently asked questions