The interface

A map of the whole window: title bar, menus, toolbar, Tools, the canvas and its tabs, the transport bar, the status bar, and the mode switch.

Celas Studio fills one window. From the top down it stacks the menu bar, the toolbar, the Tool Options bar, and then the docked area that holds the canvas and every panel. A status bar runs along the very bottom.

The docked area is yours to rearrange: see Workspaces & panels. Everything above and below it is fixed.

Title bar and window buttons#

On Windows and Linux the app draws its own title bar: the menu bar is the title bar. Drag the empty space to the right of the menus to move the window, and use the three buttons at the far right to minimise, maximise or restore, and close. The close button turns red as you approach it.

On macOS none of that appears. The system title bar and the menu bar along the top of the screen are used instead, and the menus are the native ones.

The name of the open project appears in the operating system's window title, followed by an asterisk while it has unsaved changes.

The menu bar#

Seven menus: File, Edit, Layer, Object, View, Window and Help. File is greyed out below New and Open… when no project is open, and the Object menu greys out anything that needs a selection.

The toolbar#

Under the menus is a single row of icon buttons, grouped left to right:

• Project Settings, then the Vector / Pixel mode switch, which only appears once the project has Pixel Mode turned on
• New, Open, Save
• Undo, Redo
• Copy, Cut, Paste
• Flip and rotate: Flip Horizontal, Flip Vertical, Rotate Left 90°, Rotate Right 90°
• Pathfinder: Add (Union), Subtract, Intersect, Xor, Divide
• Order: Send to Back, Back One, Forward One, Send to Front
• Align, then Distribute
• Space Horizontally, Space Vertically
• Snapping, with a small arrow that opens Snap Options
• Share and Account

When the window is too narrow for all of it, the flip, pathfinder, order, align and distribute groups collapse to a single button each and expand again when you hover them.

The Tools panel#

Tools live in a strip down the left edge. It has no title bar, no tab and no close button: you move it by the small grip pill, which sits on its left edge in a narrow layout and along the top when the buttons wrap into four rows or more. The buttons reflow to fill whatever shape you give the panel.

One slot is shared by the five shape tools and shows whichever of them you used last. Hovering any button gives you the tool name and its current key, read live from your bindings.

With no project open the whole strip is disabled, and within a project the Align, Distribute, Space and Pathfinder groups grey out whenever the selection cannot support them, so a button that looks alive always does something, and while the Home window is up it is hidden.

The Tool Options bar#

The bar directly above the canvas belongs to the active tool: pick the Brush and it fills with brush options, pick the Bone tool and it fills with bone options. It cannot be tabbed with another panel or resized, so the options are always in the same place.

The canvas and document tabs#

Open projects appear as tabs along the top of the canvas, each with a file icon, the project name, and an asterisk while it has unsaved changes. Drag tabs to reorder them. Every tab has a close ×, including the last one; closing a tab with unsaved changes asks you first.

Each document remembers its own pan and zoom, so switching tabs returns you to exactly the view you left.

Close every tab and the canvas is replaced by three cards (Home, New Project and Open…) so you are never stranded in an empty window.

The transport bar#

A strip along the bottom of the canvas carries the mode switch on the left, then playback: go to in point, previous frame, play or pause, next frame, go to out point. After those come Loop and Ping-Pong, the in and out point buttons with Clear In/Out, and buttons that jump between tag groups and image marks.

On the right of the same strip are the current frame, an FPS list offering 8, 12, 15, 24, 25, 30, 48, 50 and 60, and the Start and End of the project. The last three move into a menu at the end of the strip when the window is too narrow, rather than disappearing.

Edit, Animate and Action modes#

The button at the left of the transport bar shows which mode you are in, and clicking it switches. Tab does the same from the keyboard.

Going from Edit to Animate stores your construction pose and jumps to the frame you were last animating on. Coming back stops playback, returns to frame 0 and restores that pose: the animation is not lost, it is simply not shown while you edit.

The status bar#

The bar across the bottom of the window shows the app logo on the left, and four read-only readouts on the right: the zoom percentage, the frame position, the canvas size, and the frame rate.

The frame readout counts the animation, not the construction frame. Frame 0 is Edit mode's setup frame, so a 25-frame project runs 1 to 25 and reads 25 / 25 on its last frame; standing on the first animated frame reads 1 / 25. In Edit mode the readout is the words Edit Mode alone, with no count, because there is no timeline position to be a number of.

When you save, a small progress pill slides in beside the logo. It fills in the accent colour while it reads Saving, reads Saved once the bar is full, then fades; the fill width, not a second colour, is what tells the two apart. An automatic save says Auto-saving and Auto-saved instead, and a failure reads Save failed in red and holds much longer.