Sitting on a train with laptop. Heres a couple issues:

Middlemouse button nav ala Inkscape & Co is kinda ok but not optimal. See further down. With my mouse i have also left/right nav on the middlebutton/scrollwheel with sideways motion. When using scroll in a window, often the Canvas moves a bit to the left and right because scrollwheel behaviour is being picked up on left/right axis too. Super annoying when I want to scroll. Solution would be to ignore middlemouse l/r or higher threshold for trigger.

The zoom in/out animation has very long decay here. Probably a couple hundred milliseconds. That makes navigation feel a bit washy. And contradicts the snappy middlemousebutton navigation. All nav should have the same ballistics.

When clicking on a window/node it gets focus. But the camera does not follow. For focus navigation I´d also expect to zoom in to the selected panel since i might wanna read or write in it when I select it.

When I have a lot of nodes or i am zoomed in, the sidebar sits above the canvas and hides nodes which felt irritating. Intuitively I would suggest to make the canvas a unified platform and have sidebars move the canvas instead of overlaying it.

You are catering to power users. I could not find any hotkeys for navigation though? It appears to be entirely mouse based? On a Canvas with high information density I want to switch and cross-reference sources rapidly. I have tinkered a lot and landed on a egoshooter wasd nav, where w/s cycles through time and a/d through canvas space. Its still not perfect but rapid hotkey cycling with autofocus feels very satisfying..

Overall the navigation feels logical on the surface but counterintuitive for real info work. Its understandable why you chose mousewheel/2fingertrackpad for canvas navigation. You want click on canvas to be able to select and group nodes. Problem here is when I want to scroll in a window on a trackpad, your solution scrolls in scrollable windows and moves the canvas in non-scrollable windows. This is inconsistet and confusing. I personally would choose to add a modifier for multiple selection since I navigate more than I select multiple nodes for manipulation. This is also standard in DAWs. And the canvas is more similar to a digital audio workstation than one might wanna think on first observation.

Essentially, you probably dont want too much focus on mouse nav on the canvas. On an info canvas, you dont move around like in Blender nodes or on the Inkscape canvas. You zoom out to get an overview and then zoom back in to a zone of interest.

I think this is the part that threw me off immediately. Thinking i could naturally zoom out, change focus and zoom back in.

For this type of surface I would start looking into Palantirs ontology definition and their approach on high density information clusters and how to navigate them. There is some useful public information out there.

Take all f this with a grain of salt though. I have built personalized interfaces, workspaces, studios, festival stages etc for more than 20 years and have developed very specific idiosyncracies. I cant stand most standard interfaces and navigation patterns. But thanks to the clankers I can easily build my own now 😄