A radial menu (tool wheel) for After Effects, opened from your mouse

What is a radial menu in After Effects?

A radial menu, also called a pie menu or tool wheel, is a ring of commands that opens around your pointer. You pick by direction instead of reading a list, so after a week your hand knows where pre-compose sits and you stop looking. (If you came here to animate a turning wheel, that's a different job: an expression on Rotation.)

What a wheel saves is distance. A menu bar sits at the top of the screen and a docked toolbar sits at the side; both pull your eyes and your pointer away from the layer you're working on. A wheel opens where you already are, and closes the moment you let go.

Does After Effects have a built-in radial menu?

No. After Effects gives you keyboard shortcuts, the Tools panel, right-click context menus and the search field in the Effects & Presets panel, but nothing that opens as a ring at the pointer.

Add-ons fill the gap in two ways. Toolbar scripts such as KBar add buttons in a docked panel inside After Effects. A wheel that opens on a held mouse button has to listen to the mouse itself, so mouzeclick runs as a separate app in the tray or menu bar, watches your buttons, and talks to After Effects through a small bridge panel.

How do you open the radial menu over an After Effects comp?

Hold F10 over your comp. The groups open round the ring; move onto one and its tools fan out as discs; flick to a disc and let go. A note by the pointer says what it did.

• Tap instead of hold and the wheel stays open, so you can click a tool.
• Release in the centre to cancel.
• Hold the right mouse button instead of F10. A quick right-click is still After Effects' own menu; hold it and the wheel opens. The delay is yours, from 80 to 600 ms.
• Any other trigger works too: any key or any mouse button.
• Size and sound: S, M or L, see-through if you like, with a Soft, Pop or Chime confirmation.

For the right-button delay, start low, around 200 ms, and raise it only if the wheel pops up when you wanted the context menu. Too long and the wheel feels sticky, which is the fastest way to stop using it.

Which tools are on the After Effects radial menu?

114 tools in 13 groups. On the demo wheel the groups cover pre-comp, split and render; centre, fit and fill; new layers above your selection; blurs, effects and colour; an Anchor grid and an Align grid; freeze, time remap and speed; easing and keyframes; loop, ping-pong and wiggle; layer switches, order and markers; and work area and comp settings. The groups are shown on the Premiere Pro and After Effects tools page.

How the tools behave matters more than the count.

• New layers land above your selection, trimmed to it, and Null + Parent rigs a layer in one flick. For splitting a comp into precomps in bulk, see precompose each layer.
• One Ctrl + Z takes back a whole action, however many steps it took inside After Effects.
• An effect with nothing selected makes its own adjustment layer.
• The Anchor grid moves the anchor point and the layer never moves; the Align grid stays exact under scale and rotation. For more anchor control, see the anchor point tool guide.

Search effects fills the gaps. Type an effect's name: results show After Effects' own effect categories, Enter applies it, and Shift + Enter applies it and pins it to your wheel. If you reach for Gaussian Blur twenty times a day, pin it once. Search effects is one of the core panels listed on the extensions page.

Which Tool wheel layout should you start with?

Pick the one that matches your day; you can switch any time. There are four to start from, under Tool wheel › New: Default, Motion Design, Animate and Finishing. With the wheel open, scroll to move between layouts, so one can hold your keyframing tools and another your clean-up and render jobs.

• Editors who finish a cut in After Effects: start with Finishing.
• Motion designers building shapes and type: Motion Design.
• Keyframe-heavy work: Animate, with curves from the easing presets.
• Not sure: Default, then pin what you miss for a week.

How do you set up the Tool wheel in After Effects?

Install mouzeclick, install the After Effects bridge, restart After Effects. In order:

1. Install mouzeclick on Windows 10 or 11, or macOS 12 or newer, and enter the key from your email. On a Mac, allow it once in Privacy & Security (it isn't notarized yet) and switch on Accessibility and Input Monitoring.
2. On first run, press each mouse button once. mouzeclick builds its settings around the buttons you actually have.
3. On the Tool wheel page, press Install After Effects bridge, restart After Effects, and open Window › Extensions › mouzeclick.
4. Choose the trigger: F10, another key, a mouse button, or a held right button.
5. Pick a layout from Tool wheel › New, then pin your effects with Search effects.

Keep mouzeclick running while you work. Two more wheels come with it. The Options wheel on F8 holds 48 favourites per app on three rings (12, 16 and 20) for keys, macros, typed text and launches, and the Orbit switch on F9 puts up to 12 open apps on a ring. On a MacBook, the wheels use Fn + F8 and Fn + F9.

Is a radial menu faster than KBar or keyboard shortcuts?

Each wins at something different, and nothing stops you using all three. Keyboard shortcuts are unbeatable for the dozen commands you use every hour, if you remember them. A toolbar keeps every button visible. A wheel holds a lot behind one trigger and opens where you're looking.

Checked 31 October 2026. Where KBar is the better pick: you want one payment, you like seeing every button, you run shell commands or other scripts from buttons, or a script you own already exports to KBar. Where the wheel is better: no panel to dock on a laptop screen, the mouse hand does the work while the other stays on the keyboard, and the same habit carries into Premiere Pro. More in the KBar alternative comparison.

Does the same radial menu work in Premiere Pro?

Yes, with its own tools. Premiere Pro gets a Tool wheel with 112 tools in 12 segments, one flick each, on the same trigger, and the same bridge panel serves both apps at once. If you cut in Premiere and finish in After Effects, your hand doesn't have to learn two systems. For mouse buttons and gestures in Premiere, see Premiere Pro mouse shortcuts.

Does the After Effects Tool wheel work on Mac?

Yes. The app, its wheels, buttons and gestures, and both Tool wheels run on Windows and Mac. What the Mac app doesn't have yet: the mouzeclick workspaces, auto-captions, Retakes, cloud sync and in-app updates, which are Windows only for now (the workspaces are covered in the all-in-one After Effects extension guide). Setup steps are on the Mac page.

Why isn't my Tool wheel working in After Effects?

• The wheel opens but tools do nothing. The bridge isn't running. Install the After Effects bridge from the Tool wheel page, restart After Effects, and open Window › Extensions › mouzeclick. After a mouzeclick update, restart After Effects once.
• The context menu opens instead of the wheel. Hold a little longer, or lower the delay.
• The wheel opens when you wanted the context menu. Raise the delay toward 600 ms.
• F-keys change brightness on a Mac. Use Fn with the key, or turn on "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" in System Settings › Keyboard.
• Everything stopped at once. mouzeclick needs an internet connection while it runs; if it drops, the shortcuts pause and the mouse works as a normal mouse until it's back.

Questions people ask

Sources

Checked on 2026-10-31. Prices and features change: each link goes to the maker's own page.

1. mouzeclick: Premiere Pro and After Effects tools (After Effects Tool wheel)
2. mouzeclick home: the three wheels
3. mouzeclick for Mac
4. KBar on aescripts.com: price, features, compatibility, version

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