Workspaces & panels
Open and close panels, dock and float them, and save the arrangement as a workspace you can come back to.
Every panel in Celas Studio is opened and closed from the Window menu, and every panel can be docked against another one or left floating on its own. The arrangement is remembered between sessions, and you can store as many named arrangements as you like.
Opening and closing panels
The Window menu lists all eighteen panels with a tick beside the ones that are open. Selecting a panel shows or hides it.
| Panel | Open by default |
|---|---|
| Tools, Timeline, Layers, Properties | Yes |
| Graph Editor, Easing | Yes |
| Color, Swatches, Brushes | Yes |
| Variants, Actions | Yes |
| History, Color Harmony, Brush Studio | No |
| Layer Effects, Library, Cells, Physics | No |
A docked panel has no close button on its tab. To hide one, use the small menu button at the right-hand end of its tab bar: Close window hides the panel that is showing, and Close window group hides every panel sharing that tab bar. A floating panel has an ordinary × instead.
Docking and floating
Drag a panel by its tab. Drop it over another panel to join that tab group, or against the edge of one to split the space and sit beside it. Drag it into open space to leave it floating; a floating panel can be resized freely and dropped back later.
Three things behave differently on purpose:
- The canvas cannot be tabbed with anything. Panels dock beside it, never over it.
- The Tool Options bar is a fixed bar. It cannot be resized, split or docked over.
- The Tools panel has no tab at all: drag its grip pill to move it.
Docked side by side, Color and Color Harmony will not go narrower than about 200 pixels, so the wheel and sliders stay usable.
Collapsing a panel
Double-click a tab bar to collapse that group down to the tab strip alone, and double-click again to bring it back. It is a quick way to free the bottom of the screen without closing the Timeline. Collapsing is for the current session only: it is not saved when you quit.
Lock Panels
Window ▸ Lock Panels freezes the arrangement. With it on, panels cannot be undocked, dropped into a new place or split off, so a stray drag cannot rearrange a layout you are happy with. Turn it off to make changes again.
The built-in workspaces
Window ▸ Workspace holds three ready-made layouts:
| Workspace | What it does |
|---|---|
| General | The layout the app ships with: Tools on the left, Tool Options across the top, canvas in the middle with the Timeline and Graph Editor below it, and Color, Swatches, Layers, Properties and Easing in a column on the right |
| Animation | A layout weighted towards the timeline, and it also opens Timeline, Graph Editor, Easing and Actions if they were closed |
| Minimal | A stripped-back layout that also closes Graph Editor, Easing, Variants, Actions, Swatches and Color |
Reset to Default, at the bottom of the same submenu, puts the panels back to the General layout.
Saving your own
- Arrange the panels the way you want them.
- Choose Window ▸ Workspace ▸ Save Workspace…
- Type a name and press Save, or press Enter.
The workspace appears in the Workspace submenu above the separator, and clicking it restores the arrangement. To remove one, right-click it in the menu and choose Delete.
Where layouts are kept
The current arrangement is saved automatically when you quit and restored the next time you start, along with whichever workspace you loaded last. Saved workspaces are individual files in a workspaces folder inside the app's settings directory: see File locations for the exact path on your platform.
One exception: when an update changes the layout itself, the default arrangement is rebuilt once on the first launch of the new version, so that panels introduced by the update have somewhere to go.