The Animation Editor

The Animation Editor is a floating window that allows you to edit animation keyframes and breakdown-frames.
You can open the Animation editor from the “Animation” menu (in the “Animation UI layout”).

On the left hand side of the editor is a list of the currently selected objects.
To see objects listed here, select them in your Maya scene.
On the right side of the editor are buttons to scroll up and down in the list of the objects.

The purple line indicated the current time (“now”).
Grab-and-drag the purple line to change the current time.

At to bottom of the editor are buttons indicating the current time range displayed in the animation editor (first frame and last frame).
Press-and-drag the left button to change the start frame or press-and-drag the right button to change the last fame number displayed in the Animation Editor.
The button in the middle of the bottom row automatically frames all keyframes available on the selected objects.

Keyframes are displayed at blue circles, breakdown-keys as red circles.
You can grab-and-drag keyframes to move them through time.
The top bar is the summation of all selected objects. If you drag keyframes on this row, all keyframes on all selected objects in the Animation Editor.

To select and drag multiple keyframes together, hold the “Shift” button on your controller.
You can also draw a selection rectangle around multiple keys to select them, but you move them together you still have to hold the “Shift” button.

You can copy keys by holding the “Alt” button on your controller when you start dragging. You can copy multiple keys by selecting them (by holding “Shift” or by drawing a selection rectangle) and holding both “Shift” and “Alt” when starting to drag.

Scaling Keys

You can scale the time between keyframes in the Animation Editor by switching to “Scale” mode.
Switch between “move keys” mode and “scale keys” mode, by clicking the mode icon in the top-right corner of the Animation Editor: