Getting started

First run

While Lightbox loads, a plain orange panel with the application's name sits in the middle of the screen. It stays for about half a second and then the main window replaces it. It is deliberately plain — a placeholder, not a design — and it appears once Lightbox is far enough along to draw anything at all, so on a cold start there is still a moment before it shows up.

Lightbox opens with nothing open, and says so: an empty workspace with New…, New project… and Open… in the middle of it. Nothing is created until you choose a canvas — which means the canvas you choose is the canvas you get, rather than an untitled 960 × 540 that arrived on its own and adopted your first strokes.

A start screen appears over that offering three things: the New file fields, the New project fields, and what you had open last. Escape declines it — you are on the empty workspace, and the same choices are waiting on it and under File. Edit → Ask what to open on start-up turns the screen off and back on; the empty workspace's buttons are not affected by it.

Opening a file directly. Lightbox opens a .lightbox.json named when it is started — Open with → Lightbox in Explorer, or Lightbox.App.exe drawing.lightbox.json from a terminal — straight into that document, without the start screen.

Closing the last tab returns you to the same place: the workspace empties and the same what-to-open question is asked once, rather than a fresh untitled document being invented for you. Closing an untouched blank never argues about unsaved changes — there is nothing in it to lose.

Double-click a recent entry to open it, or select one and press Create. Recent holds files and projects together, newest first — "what was I working on" does not sort itself by kind. The same list is under File → Open recent, with Clear the list at the bottom. Anything you open or save for the first time joins it; anything that has since moved is simply not offered.

The empty start is deliberate, and it is the rule the whole application follows: optional means absent, not disabled. A document, a project, a camera, a palette, a gradient and six of the eight panels do not exist until you ask for them, and until then they cost you no screen, no keys and no thinking.

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The window

From the top:

Strip	What it is
Title bar	The Lightbox mark, the menu, and the window's own minimise / maximise / close. Drag the empty part to move the window; double-click it to maximise.
Menu	File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Animation, View, Effects, Help — lives in the title bar
Tool options	Controls for the tool you have selected. Changes with the tool; never changes height, and never scrolls — anything that does not fit goes into the ▾ at the end. On the right, the workspace picker.
AI bar	AI Inbetween, and what the model is doing
Tabs	One per open document
Work area	Tool column, canvas, and whatever panels you have docked
Info strip	Document size, layer and drawing counts, and how much headroom the machine has

Panels

The panels — Project, Layers, Color, Palette, Gradient, Channels, Reference sheets, Reference, Symbols, Tool options, Undo history, Scene, Timeline, X-sheet and Graph editor — open and close from View ▸ Dockers, where every panel toggle lives in one submenu.

Undo history is the undo record with names on it: every step of the open document — Stroke, Add layer, Resize canvas — listed oldest first, with the current state marked. Double-click a row to stand the drawing at that state, however many steps away it is; rows below the current one are dimmed and are what redo would replay, reachable the same way. A single click only selects, so scrolling the list can never rewrite the drawing. The list is this session's — closing the document ends it, and the oldest steps fall off past the undo limit. For a state that should outlive the session, keep a version (File ▸ Save version…); the two are complements, not rivals.

Each panel's header is three things at once:

• A title — or tabs, when more than one panel shares the slot. Click a tab to bring that panel forward. No panel is ever open twice, so "where is the palette" always has one answer.
• Two grips. Drag a tab to move that one panel, the way you would anywhere else. Drag the ⠿ grip beside the header's buttons — or the empty header beside the tabs, where there is any — to move the whole group, its tabs in the same order and the same one in front. The ghost names every panel it is carrying. A group dropped on an edge gets a slot of its own; dropped on another panel it joins that group's tabs at the place you aim. Let go over nothing and the group stays where it was — a floating window holds one panel. The timeline's group has no grip, because the timeline never leaves the bottom.
• A close button.

A pen drags; only a finger pans. Dragging a pen inside a list picks things up and moves them — it never slides the list. To scroll with a pen, use the wheel or the scrollbar, or hold a drag at the list's top or bottom edge. A finger on a touch screen still pans a list by dragging it.

A list scrolls under a drag. Whatever you are dragging — a layer, a swatch, a cel, a symbol, a project row — holding it within a row's height of the top or bottom of a list longer than its panel scrolls that list, for as long as you hold it there. There is a short pause first, so a drag that is only crossing a list on its way somewhere else leaves it where it was. Not yet in the project window or in a panel floated out into its own window, apart from the Layers panel, whose drag carries it everywhere.

Right-click a header for every panel. On a tab or on the empty space beside the tabs, the menu lists all the panels in three groups: the ones in this header (Palette — here), the ones open somewhere else (Layers — right), and the closed ones. A tick means open, as in View ▸ Dockers. Pick one and it opens as a tab right there, in front:

• A closed panel opens here.
• A panel open somewhere else moves here — no panel is ever open twice, so picking it takes it out of its old group, which is why the menu says where it is now.
• A panel already here comes forward.

Below the list, Float and Close act on the tab you right-clicked, which need not be the one in front. A right-click never switches tabs on its own. The timeline is not offered on other headers, since it never leaves the bottom, and a floating panel's menu has only Dock back and Close, because a window of its own holds one panel.

Panels share a slot by being dragged onto each other's headers. Drop a panel on another panel's header and the two become tabs in one slot; drop it on the body, or on an edge, and it gets a slot of its own as before. Dragging the last tab out of a group leaves the remaining panel an ordinary panel again — a group is nothing more than the panels currently sharing a slot.

Tabs rearrange by dragging along the header. Pick a tab up and slide it past its neighbours: a bright caret marks the gap it will drop into, and letting go puts it there. It is the same drag that moves a panel — pull the tab out of the header and it tears out as it always did; keep it on the strip and it only changes places. Where you aim on another panel's header is where the tab lands, so a group can be built in the order you want rather than in the order you happened to drop things. Rearranging never changes which tab is in front: the panel you were looking at is still the panel you are looking at.

The order is part of the arrangement, so it is saved with the workspace and comes back with it.

Tabbing is how a workspace offers more than it has room for. Two groups ship tabbed in every built-in arrangement, Default included, because each is several answers to one question and you want one at a time:

Group	What is in it
Colour	Colour, palette, gradient, channels
Your work	Project, reference sheets, tool options

Between them they cost two slots instead of seven. The work group is the one to know about: it is what you are working on and what you are working with — which document, which reference, and what the tool in your hand is set to — all questions you ask between strokes rather than during one. With no project open the Project tab is simply absent, so a loose drawing shows the other two.

Tool options lives there rather than waiting to be opened. With a paint tool in hand the ⚙ on the toolbar opens the brush editor at the button, because the brush is what it changes (see Brushes → The brush editor). With any other tool it opens the same Tool options page as a flyout, right at the button, so you get to it without looking away from the canvas — and if the panel is already on screen, the gear brings its tab forward instead.

The layers list is the panel that is never tabbed with anything: it is clicked in the middle of drawing, and a tab would trade a scroll for a click on every mark. Dragging it into a group is the only way to make it one.

A side holds at most four slots. A drop that would open a fifth strip lands as a tab in the nearest slot instead — nothing is refused, and the panel is where you dropped it, just tabbed. Reopening a closed panel follows the same idea: it goes back to the group you closed it out of, or joins its family (the colour panels, the timeline views) if it has never been placed by hand. A panel whose whole family is closed opens alone, and the family finds it as its members reopen.

While you drag, two things tell you what is about to happen. A small ghost follows the pointer naming the panel you are carrying, and a highlight shows where it would land:

• Near an edge with nothing on it, the highlight grows to the size of the area that would open.
• Over an existing panel — header or body — the highlight is the whole panel: let go and the two become tabs. On the header a caret also appears between two tabs, marking the position the panel would take in that strip.
• Over the tabs of the panel you are already in, only the header lights up, with the caret: nothing is moving except the tab's place in the strip.
• At a panel's very top or bottom edge, a slim band shows where the panel would slot in between its neighbours instead.
• Let go over the canvas and the panel floats in a window of its own. Drag its tab back to a dock zone to put it away again.

Every panel also has a ⧉ button beside its close button: it floats the panel where it stands. Both show when the pointer is over the panel and stay out of the way otherwise; tabbing to them with the keyboard shows them too. On a floating panel the same button reads ⇱ and docks it back where it came from. The timeline has neither — it never leaves the bottom.

The ghost stays inside the main window: drag a floating panel out past the edge and it stops at the boundary rather than following onto the desktop.

Dragging the last panel out of an edge collapses that edge — no empty gutter.

A sidebar never scrolls: its panels share the height, shrinking together as more arrive, and each panel's content scrolls inside it while its bars stay put. Tab panels together when a side gets crowded.

Collapse a group you are not using. Double-click any of its tabs, press the chevron beside the float button, or right-click the header and choose Collapse group: the panel rolls up to its header and the others on that side share the height it gave up. Every group's name stays in view, so the side reads as a list of what is there with only the open ones taking room. Double-click again, or press the chevron, to open it. Bringing a panel forward opens its group — clicking another of its tabs, opening a panel into it from the header menu, dropping one onto it, or the toolbar's ⚙ — because each of those is asking to see a panel. Which groups are collapsed is part of the arrangement, saved with the workspace, and a group comes back open at the height it had before. A collapsed group has no splitter beside it, so two open panels with a collapsed one between them are resized against their other neighbours, or by opening the one between. Only the left and right sides collapse; the bottom strip's panels sit side by side, where a header alone would leave a column of nothing. This is on purpose: five panels each too short to use is a worse outcome than five panels at their proper size with a scrollbar.

Most panels are capped in width, because they hold fixed-size controls and stretching them just adds whitespace. The Layers, Project and Timeline panels are not capped — they hold lists as long as the work.

Bars on the canvas

Two small bars float on the canvas itself rather than taking a strip:

• View bar — zoom, rotate, mirror, reset. The same six live at the top of the View menu, so they can be reached — and given keys in Configure's shortcut editor — with the bar hidden.
• Shortcut bar — onion skin on the layer you are drawing on, view-through-camera if the document has a camera, and one play/pause button.

Both are listed under View separately from the panels, because they are a different trade: a panel takes room away from the drawing, a bar sits on top of it. Somebody who wants no panels at all may still want the zoom readout.

Drag a bar by its ⠿ grip to any edge of the canvas. It follows the pointer as you drag, goes to whichever edge you are nearest, and stays where you left it along that edge as a fraction, so resizing the window does not send it wandering. On a left or right edge it stacks downwards so its length runs along the edge instead of jutting out over the drawing — the icons stay the right way up. The zoom readout is the one thing that turns, because "100%" does not fit across a narrow bar; it turns so its feet face the canvas.

▾ rolls a bar up to its grip. ✕ hides it; View brings it back. Edge, position, collapsed and hidden are all part of the workspace, so they save, reset and switch with it.

What a bar offers depends on the work: an Illustration project is not going to be played, so it is not given a play button, and no document shows the camera toggle until it has a camera.

Making the interface bigger or smaller

Edit → Configure → Interface → Interface scale draws every panel, toolbar, menu and canvas bar larger or smaller, from 75% to 200% in steps of 5%. Drag the slider and the window follows as you go; type a number in the field for an exact size; 100% puts it back.

The panels grow with their contents rather than cramming bigger text into the same space: a sidebar at 150% is half as wide again on screen, so a larger scale leaves less room for the canvas. A width you dragged a sidebar to is kept through the change, and a layout saved at one scale opens at the right proportions at another.

The canvas is never scaled — that is what its zoom is for — and the setting changes nothing in your documents. It belongs to this machine, not to a workspace, so switching workspaces does not change how big the text is. The Configure window and other dialogs stay at their own size.

Dark-lit and Studio grey

Edit → Configure → Interface → Theme chooses how the interface around your work looks. It switches at once, everywhere, with no restart.

• Dark-lit, the default, keeps the canvas the brightest thing on the screen and suits a dim room.
• Studio grey is a mid-grey surround, the most neutral for judging a painting's values, and suits a bright room.

Neither changes a pixel of your work, and the choice belongs to this machine, like the interface scale. Both are grey on purpose: colour on screen is your drawing's, so a control that is on is a lighter fill rather than a hue, and a field you are typing in or a list you have opened is marked by a thin edge of light.

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Workspaces

A workspace is a named arrangement of panels. Workspaces are global, never stored in a project — a layout is a property of you, not of the artwork, and opening someone else's file must not rearrange your screen.

Seven ship with the app: one per project type, plus Default. Switch with the picker at the top right of the Quick options bar.

Switching does not touch your rulers or guides. Whether the rulers are up, whether guides are drawn, and whether guides and references can be grabbed say how you are working rather than which panels are open — so they cross a workspace switch with you. Only the arrangement changes.

Every one of them opens the colour group and the work group described above. The ones whose deliverable moves — Animation, Game art, Storyboard, Asset library and Default — also open the timeline group: the track timeline in front, the X-sheet and the graph editor tabbed behind it. Illustration and Comic do not, and that is most of what makes those two feel like single-image work: the bottom strip is screen they give back.

An asset library gets a timeline for a reason worth stating: a sprite sheet is a character cycle, which is animation under another name.

If you have used Lightbox before, these defaults do not move your panels. Your arrangement is your own and stays as you left it; Reset workspace on a built-in is what brings the shipped one back.

• View → Workspace → Save current workspace overwrites the selected one with the arrangement on screen — built-ins included. No copy is made.
• Save as new workspace… stores the arrangement as a workspace of its own. Leave the name unchanged and it becomes “Name (edited)”, because this route always makes a new workspace.
• Reset workspace discards your changes. A built-in goes back to how it shipped — even after you have saved over it — and a workspace of your own goes back to what you last saved.

Saved workspaces carry a bin in the picker. The built-ins do not: a built-in is what reset falls back to, so deleting one would take the fallback with it.

The picker marks a workspace you have since rearranged with a *.

The app reopens as you left it. The arrangement on screen — panels, rulers, guide visibility and lock, splitters — survives a restart whether or not you saved it into a workspace, star and all. Saving a workspace is still what makes an arrangement nameable; reset still returns to the saved snapshot. What the restart no longer does is quietly undo the tweaks you made since.

The quick bar is the workspace's

What the Quick options bar carries is part of the workspace, chosen for the work rather than fixed: the Animation, Game art and Storyboard workspaces put the transport (play/pause) and frame buttons at eye level, the single-image workspaces carry the paint kit and the marquee, and Default shows every tool's own group. The bar's left never moves whatever the workspace says: the colour pair, the brush preset button with its ⚙, and Size and Opacity are pinned. Picking a preset puts its tool in your hand, so the brush button is also the way back to painting from any tool.

The workspace itself is the dropdown at the right-hand end. Whatever does not fit on the bar goes into the ▾ beside it, nearest first — so on a narrow window you keep the controls that matter and lose the ones you can reach elsewhere, rather than losing the row. Widen the window and they come back on their own.

The ⋮ button beside the workspace picker chooses the contents — tick and untick what this workspace offers. The choice behaves like any other workspace edit: the picker marks it with * until you save, reset undoes it, and a saved workspace remembers it. A tool-bound group you carry still shows only while its tool is in hand — carrying Fill options does not pin a dead strip to the bar all day. Everything you untick stays reachable: a brush's in the brush editor, every other tool's in the Tool options panel.

When you create a project, you are asked whether to keep the arrangement you are in or take that project type's defaults. It is a question at that moment, not something the project remembers.

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