Once part of the canvas is the way you want it, locking keeps it that way. A locked element can't be moved, resized, or deleted by accident, so you can keep building around it without knocking it out of place.
Locking and Unlocking
Select an element and click the Lock button in its floating toolbar, or press Cmd+Shift+L (Ctrl+Shift+L on Windows and Linux). The button reads Unlock while it's locked, so the same control toggles it back, and so does the shortcut. Select several elements first and the button locks or unlocks the whole selection at once. Locking is a normal edit: it syncs to collaborators and Undo reverses it.
A locked element shows a small padlock badge on its top-left corner, selected or not, so it's clear at a glance which parts of the canvas are protected (arrows show no badge, and the badge hides when you zoom far out). Only Editors get the Lock button; Viewers and Participants don't.
What Locking Protects
A locked element:
- Can still be selected, so you can always reach it to unlock it.
- Can't be moved: dragging its body does nothing.
- Can't be resized: its resize handles are hidden entirely, so there's nothing to grab.
- Can't be deleted: the toolbar's Delete is disabled, Delete and Backspace skip it, the eraser passes over it, and a multi-select delete keeps the locked members while removing the rest. Deleting a shape that an arrow connects to also leaves a locked arrow in place.
- Can still be labelled: double-click to edit its text. Locking protects an element's position and existence, not its content.
Arrows lock the same way: a locked arrow's endpoint handles can't be dragged, and it can't be moved or deleted until you unlock it. Double-clicking a locked arrow doesn't open its label; use Edit Text on its selection toolbar instead.
This per-element lock is different from the brief lock you see in a live session, where an element someone else has selected is held for them until they move on. See live presence for that one.
Lock a finished background, frame, or legend before you start arranging the busy part of a diagram, so the foundation stays put while you work on top of it. To protect a whole slice of the canvas, lock its layer; to freeze a whole tab at once, see locking a tab.
Was this article helpful?