P: Need better zooming

I am using 2015.3 on a Mac 10.11.4 with Retina display.

The max zoom system accessed with cmd-= (aka cmd-+) and cmd-- is not too useful. The user cannot smoothly advance the zoom with cmd-+ and then back out with cmd--. You have to set the max zoom with a menu and then you jump from 1:1 to the max. Huh? That is just plain stupid. Lots of extra mouse clicks. Basically you zoom by menu selection. Back in the 1970's we did that because we had no choice. We have better technology now.

Also, why doesn't cmd-0 work to jump to 1:1?

Hitting the spacebar makes it a bit easier, but it still needs a click. And it's not as fast as it should be.
Besides, I'm completely wasting the two-axis scroll on my Magic Mouse as both directions only change the brush size.

Point being, these things should be configurable to the user. I also couldn't believe there is no way to change these shortcuts in the settings...

Oh, but thanks Rikk and Steve, that tip made my life a bit easier!

You can also hold down Space and then drag with your mouse to move the image while editing a brush adjustment, but the zoom only changes in big increments. A scrubby zoom should easily be possible to implement now that LR6 has GPU support.

As Rory said, using the Space bar to zoom in and out, or pan, works well with all Local Adjustment tools.

Try Space + Mouse Click.

As someone who is in the middle of switching from Aperture to LR, the zoom key functionality makes me crazy. It's a total and complete charlie foxtrot.

In Aperture, pressing z toggles zoom between 100% and zoomed to fit on the image where your cursor is at the moment. So this could be useful to extremely quickly inspect different details on the image by just moving your cursor, hitting z, hitting z again, moving to another point, repeat, etc.
Lightroom instead zoom to the point you last selected and keeps that (wtf?).

But that's just for convenience. The real problem comes with brushes.
I spend almost 50% of the editing time playing with brushes.

With Aperture, I can select a brush, make edits, then move my cursor to one position and press z to zoom in, continue doing more precise edits, then press z again to go back, etc.

Using Lightroom, I didn't find any other way to zoom into different parts on the image, other than closing the brush, using zoom tool and going back to the brush.
Or, use the navigator to move my zoom.
Both options are horrible.

I would at least like to have an option for the z key to go to where my cursor is, not where it was the last time.

This is the biggest obstacle for me personally.

LR6 should really have an improved zooming! ACR9 and Photoshop have scrubby zoom etc. Please add that to LR!

I was hoping this would have been improved with LR6 but sadly it hasn't.

It's very confusing when working in both PS and LR as there's a strong tendency to try to use the PS Alt+drag zoom or Ctrl+0/Ctrl+1 in LR and they just don't work!

Lots of improvements in LR6, for which I am thankful, but surely with the new GPU support this is not now too much to ask for LR6.1?

but we are going off topic for what I wanted - a significantly better tool for zooming.

once I translated your comment JL, I examined what I think you tried to say.

I now have ZOOM CLICKED POINT TO CENTRE.

for example
Im in spot mode and want to zoom.
pressing Z zooms the picture to the last edit
pressing space gives you the zoom icon and then yes you can zoom to where you click, I assume that is what your comment above means.
It is still a 2 hand control, it works, I guess I will have to learn it, but its not as simple as simply pressing Z ( or space when not using a tool) and zooming to where the mouse cursor is.