Panels, themes and preferences
Panels #
Every panel docks, tabs, floats and resizes. Drag one by its tab to the side of another to dock beside it, onto it to share its place as a tab, or out over the canvas to float it; drag the line between two to size them. The Window menu opens and closes each one. The canvas keeps the middle and cannot be covered or moved.
The arrangement is kept between sessions, and the Window > Layouts menu has three arrangements built in:
- Drawing: tool options and palette on the left; layers, elements, properties and transform on the right.
- Animation: the timeline pinned under the canvas, and the other panels grouped as tabs.
- Compact: for a small screen; one group of tabs on the right.
Save current layout... keeps the arrangement under a name of your own, and choosing it brings it back. Reset layout puts the default back.
Themes #
Edit > Preferences... > Appearance chooses how the program looks. Nine themes ship:
| Theme | Character |
|---|---|
| Slate | cool grey-blue with amber, the default |
| Graphite | neutral grey with a blue accent |
| Midnight | deep blue-black that lets the canvas glow |
| OLED | true black, so a pixel that is not lit is off |
| High contrast dark | black, white and one yellow; every pair above 7:1 |
| Paper | the same arrangement turned over for a bright room |
| Warm paper | a soft sepia, gentle for long sessions |
| Famicom | cream plastic and deep red |
| High contrast light | white, black and one blue |
- Accent: nine presets and a picker. The accent is moved only as far as it must be to be seen and to carry text.
- Interface size (75% to 150%) scales text and spacing, never the canvas; density (Compact, Comfortable, Spacious) changes how much air there is.
- Readability says which colour pairs are hard to read and offers Fix them.
- Colours lists every part of the interface with its own picker, hex value and a reset. Edits show at once; Save as
new theme keeps them as a theme of your own (a
.lsthemetext file you can copy, edit and send). Import... and Export... exchange theme files.
Preferences #
General:
- A new document: the size, background and palette a new document starts with.
- Working: how often autosave writes, and the undo depth (undo steps).
- The canvas: the pixel grid's colour and opacity, and the chequer's colours and square size.
- Language: English or Spanish.
Keys: every shortcut is a named command. Choose one and press the new keys (up to four per command); you are warned where two commands share a key; reset one or all. The menus show whatever keys you have. Help > Keyboard shortcuts lists them all.
Preferences and keys are plain text files in the settings folder (preferences.txt, keys.txt) that the program reads
defensively: a hand-edited file can make Fast odd, never broken.
Command search #
Ctrl+Shift+P (or Help > Search commands...) finds any command by a few letters and runs it with Enter.
Languages #
The menus, headings, tool and command names go through a plain-text catalogue per language; English and Spanish ship
with the program. The catalogue format is documented in the project's docs/translating.md.
This is the guide that ships inside the program (F1).