Home and project tabs

StykAnimate opens on Home: the place to start a new animation, pick up a project you worked on before, and learn with five short tutorials. Every project you open gets a tab in the top bar, so you can keep several open and switch between them. This guide shows you both.

Home

Home is a page that lies over the editor. Your open projects stay open behind it, exactly as you left them. From top to bottom it has:

• A greeting, and Back to your project when a project is open. It takes you back to the editor, as do Esc and the house button.
• Start: three new animations and Open a file. See Start a new animation.
• Projects (desktop app): the animations you opened or saved. See Your projects.
• Learn: the five tutorials, with the ones you finished ticked. See Five short tutorials.
• Help: Keyboard shortcuts, Search commands and, in the desktop app, What’s new and Send feedback.

To come back to Home, click the house button next to the StykAnimate logo at the left of the top bar, or choose File → Home in the StykAnimate menu. While Home shows, playback pauses and the editor’s buttons in the top bar step aside.

Start a new animation

Under Start, pick the shape of your video. Each one opens a new animation with Blue, the starter figure, ready to pose:

Open a file opens a project from your computer: a .styk file, or a Pivot or Stick Nodes animation. You can change the scene’s size later in Scene settings.

Your projects

In the desktop app, every animation you open or save appears under Projects, with a small picture, how long it is and when it last changed. Click one to open it. If it is already open, its tab comes to the front instead.

• Find one: type in Search projects. It matches the project’s name and its folder.
• Order: Last opened, Name or Last changed. Pinned projects always come first.
• Grid or List: the list also shows each project’s folder, length, last change and size.
• A project’s menu (its ⋯ button, or right-click it): Open, Pin to the top, Move to folder, Show in folder and Remove from list.
• Folders: New folder beside All projects and Pinned. A folder here is only a label for the list: your files stay where they are.

Remove from list never deletes the file, and nor does deleting a folder. If a file was moved or deleted, its card says File not found: remove it from the list, or open the file from its new place.

Five short tutorials

The tutorials under Learn teach by doing: you work in the real editor, one step at a time. Each takes two or three minutes.

1. Click a tutorial under Learn. It opens a practice animation called Practice in a tab of its own, so your projects are never touched.
2. A strip at the top of the stage says what to do. A ring shows where. When the step is done, the strip turns green and moves on by itself.
3. Stuck? Show me acts the step out for you. Skip moves on, and the title in the strip lists every step.
4. At the end, the strip offers the next tutorial, or Back to Home. Leave the tutorial stops at any time.

You can open them again any time with Help → Tutorials in the StykAnimate menu. Prefer to read? The basics goes further, with playgrounds on the page.

Several projects in tabs

Every project you open, start or restore gets a tab in the top bar, next to the house button. The tab shows a small picture of the stage and the project’s name. A grey dot means changes you haven’t saved yet; when you save, the dot turns green for a moment and goes away.

• Switch: click a tab. Each project keeps its own undo history, view and selection, so you carry on where you left off.
• New: the + after the tabs, or Ctrl+N, starts a new animation in a new tab. Opening a file does the same, except that an untouched new animation makes way for it.
• Rename: double-click the tab, or press F2 while it has the keyboard focus.
• Close: point at the tab and click its ×, or middle-click it. If it has unsaved changes, StykAnimate asks first.
• Reorder: drag a tab along the strip.
• The tab’s menu (right-click it): for the project in front, Save, Save as…, Rename project…, Close project and Close saved projects; for another one, Switch to this project and Close project.

Copy something in one project and paste it in another: the clipboard works across tabs. Up to 12 projects can be open at once. When two or more are open, the StykAnimate menu lists them under Open projects too.

Switch with the keyboard

In the desktop app:

In the browser, these keys belong to the browser’s own tabs, so StykAnimate leaves them alone: click a project’s tab instead. You can give the commands keys of your own in Settings → Shortcuts.

Closing, saving and recovery

• Closing a project brings it to the front first, so you can see what you are asked about. The project you used before it comes back.
• Closing the window (desktop app) asks once for every project with unsaved changes: Save all, Cancel or Discard all.
• Recovery: each project keeps its own recovery copy. After a crash, StykAnimate offers each one back, in a tab of its own.

Closing the last project leaves you a new, empty animation. More in Save, open and recover.

Open straight into the editor

Prefer to start drawing right away? Open Settings (Ctrl+,), go to Interface and turn off Show Home when the app starts. The app then opens straight into a new animation, and the house button still takes you to Home. Opening a project file from your computer always goes straight to that project.

Common questions

Keep going