Click to Play in Viewer and Compositor

In both the Viewer and Compositor windows, there is an arrow on the right hand side of the other buttons in the edit panel as shown in figure 2.18. The "play" button can be toggled on/off via this arrow, which has the tooltip of Click to play . When enabled the arrow is white surrounded by green and when disabled the arrow is red.⁴The purpose of enabling this capability is to make it really easy to play the media in the window by just using the left mouse button to start or stop the play. The entire main canvas surface becomes a big play button! Although the default is initially off, a good reason to enable this, at least temporarily, is so that you can quickly review your video before a render.

left click

forward play or stop forward play if already playing

middle wheel

single frame forward or back

middle click

reverse play or stop reverse play if already playing. Note that some 3 button mice do not accommodate a middle click for reverse but you can find out by testing from a terminal window with the command xev.

Footnotes

... red.⁴

the color and the look will be different for themes other than the default theme of Cakewalk