Interactions

kepler's Interactions menu has a section for each of the features below — tooltip, brush, coordinate display, legend, fading on zoom, the map's name and description, bookmarks, camera animation, geocoder — and the panel manages one of them for you.

Tooltip

Hovering a feature shows selected fields from its row. Which fields is configurable per dataset, and the defaults are rarely what you want on a wide table.

Two formatting behaviours are worth knowing, both from kepler: a field whose name contains <img> and whose value is an HTTP URL renders as an image, and a value starting with http:// renders as a clickable link. Both work in a Grafana panel.

Dates in the tooltip are shown in the time zone picked in the tooltip's settings, which is saved with the map. It is kepler's own setting: it does not follow the dashboard's time zone.

Clicking a feature pins the tooltip so it stays put; a blue pin icon unpins it. A right-click pins it too.

Because the panel passes every column without a role through untouched, everything your query selected is available here — including columns you added purely for the tooltip.

Brush

Darkens the map and illuminates only the area under the cursor. It reads well on arc and flow layers, where a dense map is otherwise impossible to follow.

Tooltip and brush cannot both be active. kepler enforces that, not the panel.

Coordinate display

Shows the latitude and longitude under the pointer, and lets you pin a spot.

The panel switches this one on by itself

A Coordinates cross-filtering mapping is built on kepler's pinned coordinate. So when such a mapping is configured, the panel enables the coordinate interaction — and re-enables it if you turn it off, since the mapping would otherwise silently stop publishing.

Turning it off in kepler's menu is therefore not a way to disable the channel. Remove the mapping under Cross-filtering instead.

If you have no Coordinates mapping, the switch behaves exactly as it does in stock kepler.

With the coordinate display on, a right-click on empty map opens a small menu at the pointer with Copy coordinates, which puts lat, lng on the clipboard. The same menu offers Add Annotation, whether or not the coordinate display is on, to anyone who can see the map. Map notes, the Aa annotation list and how they meet Grafana's own annotations are in Annotations.

Clicks, and who gets them

The map's click has several possible meanings, and they do not conflict:

Situation	What a click does
Draw toolbar engaged	belongs to the drawing; publishes nothing
A Click mapping configured	publishes the clicked entity's column value
A Coordinates mapping configured	pins the place and publishes the pair
Neither	pins the tooltip, as in stock kepler

Clicking empty map clears a Click mapping's variable — but only when the value currently in it was published by this panel, so a shared link's preset survives a stray click.

A right-click counts as a click for both mappings: on a feature it publishes what a click would, and on empty map a Coordinates mapping publishes the place, and the menu above opens as well.

See Cross-filtering for both mappings, and Data links and actions for the links and buttons a clicked entity's popup can carry.

Legend

Chooses which layers appear in the map's legend. A layer left out stays on the map; Hide hidden layers in legend also drops the ones switched off. The switch at the top of this section and the legend button in the map control are the same switch. Both are saved with the map. See Map settings.

Fade on zoom

Fades layers and annotations in and out as the map zooms. Each controller names the layers it drives and four zoom levels: where they Appear, the Full start and Full end of full opacity, and where they Disappear. Saved with the map. On a dashboard it is a way to keep a detailed layer, labels or a dense point cloud out of the way at country zoom without a second panel.

Map info

A Name and a Description for the map, shown in a card on its right side; the description can carry links written as [label](https://…). Both are saved with the map. kepler keeps them apart from the configuration it exports, so the panel saves them beside it, the way kepler's own Export map does.

Bookmarks

Saved views of the map. Add Bookmark keeps the current centre, zoom, bearing and pitch under a name you can edit. Each bookmark has Go to, Update view (replace it with the current view), Copy coordinates and Delete, and bookmarks reorder by dragging.

The section's switch, off by default, puts a Bookmarks list on the map beside the map control. A click on a name flies the map there, so a dashboard's viewers can move between places with the side panel hidden. Like the legend, the list moves by its title and resizes from its top or bottom edge; closing it turns the switch off. The bookmarks and the switch are saved with the map.

Camera animation

A tour through views. Add stop takes the current view or one of the bookmarks. Each stop holds for a while, then travels to the next (2 and 3 seconds to begin with), and stops reorder by dragging along the track. Play, pause, restart and a scrubber sit at the bottom of the section, and the stops are saved with the map.

The tour plays from this section only; nothing on the map starts it. On a dashboard it therefore needs the side panel (Show side panel).

Neither bookmarks nor the tour work on a split map or on the globe: the sections ask for a single 2D or 3D map, and the list leaves the map.

Geocoder

kepler's geocoder needs a Mapbox token and is therefore not usable here, which is consistent with the rest of the plugin's premise. Use the Center cross-filtering mapping to move the map programmatically instead — a text box or a table data link becomes the search box.

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Upstream: Interactions

Written against kepler.gl 3.3.0-alpha.20. See Upstream documentation.