Alej

If by "cursor tool" you mean the tool with same arrow-shaped icon as the Move Tool, on my Mac its tooltip calls it the "Slice Selection Tool." 

But from what I can tell experimentally (because I cannot find any mention of it in the built-in help) it isn't a slice selection tool at all. Instead it is a layer selection tool. So it is easily the worst named & documented tool in any Affinity app! 
The Slice Tool behaves differently if you click vs. click & drag. If you just click without dragging on an existing slice, the cursor changes to the 4 arrows pointing outward from a box one & then it acts like the Move Tool, revealing the control handles of the selected slice so you can resize it or drag it to a new position. If instead you click & drag it will create a new slice.
You can also toggle between the move & new slice modes by shift-clicking on an existing slice.
The status bar shows the various options for the Slice Tool but it still can be a bit confusing because of the odd choice for the name of the Slice Selection Tool.

This thread is generally pretty old, but Alej's last comment is exactly what I'm struggling with as well (Affinity Designer 2.4.2, but also in some older versions). There are five colors that I can control:
Character color Character outline color Character background color Character underline color Character strikethrough color And there's one that I can't figure out how to control, which I'll call "Text frame background color" but it happens with both frame and artistic tools.
If I start a new document, all is okay. But at some point during my development process, all my new text boxes (artistic or frame style have the same issue) have a non-transparent background. It's not always white, and I can't figure out what starts it to happen. I've even see the 'default' background color change at some point, but despite my best efforts, I can't figure out what I'm doing that sets the color. Here is a video that demonstrates what I'm seeing; the text frame background color is black in this case.

text frame background color.mov   Some facts (as I've experienced them):
It starts happening at some point. New documents are okay. The color is affected by something I'm doing, but usually I notice a few hours in and can't trace it back. Copy/paste of existing (unaffected) text boxes is okay; the background is fine. This is my (irritating) workaround. I can't see anything in Text Styles that points to the issue. I've attached a striped-down `background_test.afdesign` file that demonstrates the issue. If you open it, maybe you'll be able to reproduce it.
background_test.afdesign

Opening it in Publisher, and switching to the Text Frame panel, I can see that there's a Black background color set.
How it got there will probably remain a mystery, unless you have a file where it worked and then started happening, and you can check the History to see what happened. And if you have a sample like that, Saving with History might be useful.
You can resolve for future uses of Artistic or Frame Text by selecting one of those tools, and then using Edit > Defaults > Revert, possibly followed by Edit > Defaults > Save.

It worked!! @walt.farrell thank you 100 times. By using Edit > Defaults > Revert and then saving the document, the defaults are reverted and my sanity is restored. There does seem to be some kind of weird bug if you have an empty Artboard selected when you Revert... it turns grey. Not sure if this is just rendering or something more sinister.
If I ever figure out how this gets in this background color situation in the first place, I'll let everyone know.

Presets created in individual adjustment panels can only be accessed through the Adjustment panel [View > Studio > Adjustment]. In this case, open the Adjustment panel and click on the Gradient Map line. This will insert a Gradient Map adjustment into your Layer stack, but it should also reveal any/all of your saved presets. Click on  one of them to change the gradient map to the one you want.
Before you even say it, I also think that the presets should be available from their associated panels (that is, the gradient map presets should be available from the Gradient Map panel, and so forth) but that's a whole different argument.

I can save Affinity Photo Gradient Map Preset in Photo. But can't seem to find how to reuse them! Could anyone please help?

Can we have a way of toggling the  on and off from the layer icon, having to go into the  to turn off the  is tedious.

Helloo heyy its 2021. There is no update on this yet right?

Update:

If hardware acceleration is disabled (Metal), everything is working fine.

It looks that 'resize canvas' option have a bug - which will blur the image.
I have attached three images here, first two are zoomed to 200% to better see the bug, and third image (original/smaller at the bottom) is here if you want to try it for yourself.
How to reproduce the bug:
1. Open/load image to AP (the smaller one at the bottom of this post which is 433x178px)
2. set "resize canvas" to 450x185px with anchor set to "center", "left" or "right"
3. see the results (the image will be blurred)

I'm using the latest AP version 1.7.3

Ah my bad, could be that it’s not clear because of how I start the sentence, maybe I should rephrase it as a shortcuts bug. Maybe should do it soon, the problem is with configuring shortcuts, provided that there no conflicts prompted by a warning sign:
1. setting alt + delete (or ctrl delete) as the shortcut, for example, will just delete the layer and not perform the fill (even if it doesn’t conflict with other shortcuts)
2. Setting it as alt enter (or an another one with enter) will not perform anything.
Will capture a video to first double check that it is a bug (and tagged as so), and that it is affinity photo v2 (hence not feedback for v1).
And no, I dislike photoshop and adobe ways in general, that’s why I’m moving away… but I can’t put familiar shortcuts to ease the move, it’s definitely a friction point at least? But these don’t have to be the default forced on everyone, I’ll give you that.

Bump. Any update on this? 
I'm using macOS Affinity Photo on my iPad via Sidecar.

Hi. 
I would like to ask more about this.
Is there any update?

Me too. Does anybody from Affinity read these posts?

I'm also having this problem. The sensitivity in affinity designer for the iPad in sidecar mode is awful. There needs to be an easy way to globally adjust this. I have both the Mac and iPad version of Designer and the iPad version works fine. 

If there is a fix for this, please let me know.

Apple doesn't let you tweak the pressure curve on pencil because they make it a states rights issue and leave it to developers to implement. Fair play. However, the default pressure sensitivity really sucks, and may encourage people to damage their iPads by drawing too hard. The default setting needs to be about 8x as sensitive, but there is no way to adjust this now. We really need a pressure sensitivity adjustment slider for the desktop version.

Sure, but tilt and pressure does not seem to be implemented for iPad (6th generation). But that was my question, how and if this will work on such an iPad with Affinity for iPad.
I have only tried those things with simpler pencil-enabled apps, and it does not work. But I am not skilled enough to figure out if this is on by app basis, or on the hardware basis...

(Woah that's really cool !!)

That's a perfect exemple ! I just want the devs to be aware that it is really a important feature that's currently missing from both Photo and Designer and it would improve the workflow a lot if we didn't have to resolve to workarounds with duplicated layers or masks.

If I have to redo the whole mask everytime I add pixels or shapes to the group, or every time I want to move them, then I think it's just not working the way clipping masks should ! Especially because in real production, it's never just 3 circles but a bunch more shapes, or complex drawings like the one Neil showed here (and really, it's basic stuff but I want to be move them and have the clipping layer match the group in real time).
But I really appreciate what you guys are proposing as solutions, it's just not what we're after.
Hopefully this still goes into some kind of future todo list for the devs, that's why i'm writting this ^^

I'm sure there's a clever way to make groups work with the current "drag inside" system (if not, something similar to Photoshop would also be great).

I'd like to bump this issue This has been kind of a deal breaker for me, for the moment (still happy to support the project though, it's a wonderful piece of software).
Even with the "drag inside" method (which I get, it's not Photoshop, doesn't have to be, and it's a really fine and intuitive way to clip things), it really needs a way to handle groups, without merging or duplicating the layers/shapes (all of the workaround I've seen involves one of those two things, and it's really not great, it breaks the workflow, and you have to manage a lot of duplicated layers).

I would love to see this feature come to Affinity Photo and also Designer !

Hey there! So as far as I can tell this still isn't possible in Affinity Photo. I want to be able to clip a layer to a group. See attached image. Has this been added and I just missed it?
Basically every psd I've made uses this feature, so as well as not being able to import my psds because of this, I can't really use affinity photo since this technique is a huge part of my workflow. Any word on the possibility of adding this? Would love to make the switch from photoshop!
Thanks for listening!
- Neil

Lot of forum topic about this but answer is nowhere. So the software can't do it and that's a shame.

How come this thread dates back to 2015 and the shortcut that seems like it would be 5 minutes of code still hasn't been implemented? lol

I am trying to convert from PS for two weeks now and there's a few niggles in workflow speed. I'm down to 75 days left on my 90 day trial and lack of this hotkey would probably sway me to stick with PS sorry to say. I do love how Affinity Photo feels more native in performance than what PS has degraded too over the last few years but workflow speed is workflow speed. If I can flow with my jobs effortlessly then I do a better job. Being forced to spend more time and clicks doing something so simple causes disruption to my flow. 

This thread has so much support for this hotkey lol. And not wanting to sound arrogant but seeing a staff member comment very early on back in 2015 and still not resolving this issue doesn't give me the best impression for further "feature" development. Take this as constructive criticism from someone using this software for 2 weeks professionally (5-8 hours a day heavy usage coming from a 19 year profession in using photo editing software). I know your strongest marketing point is Price and that's great but what about those who can afford PS for life too? Gotta hook me with something even if it's as small as a hotkey.

I'm on an a MacBook Pro and I couldn't get ⌘⌫ (command + delete) nor ⌥⌫ (option + delete) to fill. Instead it would delete a layer.
So I opted for the closest key in proximity to delete, which is the backslash (\) key. Now I have ⌘\ to fill with foreground color and ⌥\ to fill with background color. It's only one key away, so for me it should be good for the time being. I would still prefer the same keystrokes as Photoshop.
 

Yup, I think we know that. If you have a selection (e.g. on a mask), and press option/command+backspace, like you would in PS, can you set this to ,,Fill selected area with Primary/Secondary colour"? I think most of us miss this.
(D,X, alt/cmd+backspace is so deep in my muscle memory, that this missing (or well hid) feature amost hurts!)

Just wanted to say +1 for a keyboard shortcut for filling a selection (e.g., Option + Delete for primary (foreground in PS) and Command + Delete for secondary (background in PS)).
 
Use those all the time in PS and am really missing that feature in Photo at the moment!  :(