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 twenty-one 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, Navigator, References, Color Harmony, Brush Studio | No |
| Quick Menu, Layer Effects, Library, Cells, Physics | No |
No panel has a 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. Floating panels and floating groups carry the same menu.
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 from any edge and dropped back later. Floating panels and dialogs stay above the app's own window only, never above other applications.
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, and References not narrower than about 220, so their controls 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. A floating panel, or a floating group of tabbed panels, also folds down to its tabs from the button on the left of its tab bar. Collapsing is for the current session only: it is not saved when you quit.
The Quick Menu
The Quick Menu is a strip of on-screen keys for working with a pen or on a touch screen, when a keyboard is not at hand. It starts with Esc, Enter, Delete, Tab, the four arrow keys and three modifiers: Shift, Alt and Ctrl. A modifier latches: tap it and it stays held, lit, until you tap it again, so you can hold Shift while you drag with the pen.
The last button adds more: any other key from a short list, or any command from the shortcut list, which then runs exactly as its keyboard shortcut would. Right-click a button to remove it, and drag buttons to put them in a new order; an accent line shows where a button will land.
Open it from Window ▸ Quick Menu. The built-in workspaces dock it as a strip above the canvas, and it stays there when the layout is reset. Like the Tools panel it has no tab: you move it by its grip.
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. It also hides the ☰ menu button on tab bars, since closing panels is part of the arrangement; show or hide panels from the Window menu instead. 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. The workspace in use has a check mark. To remove one, hover it in Window ▸ Workspace and click the delete button on its row.
Panels you move after loading a saved workspace stay where you put them after a restart.
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.