Settings

Settings is where you make StykAnimate comfortable: dark or light, bigger or smaller, how the mouse wheel and the joint dots behave, and how often your work is kept safe. This guide shows you where everything is and which settings are worth changing first.

Open Settings

A setting (also called a preference) changes how the editor behaves on your computer. It never changes your animation.

1. Press Ctrl+, (Ctrl and the comma key). You can also choose Edit → Preferences… in the menu bar, or Settings… in the StykAnimate menu at the far left of the top bar.
2. The Settings window opens on Interface. The list on the left has the other pages: Canvas, Animation, Shortcuts and, in the desktop app, Feedback.
3. Click a page in the list to see its settings. Each page starts with one line that says what it is for.
4. Close Settings with the round × at the top right, or press Esc. Your changes are already saved.

Try it: change three settings

This is the real Settings window. Everything in it works here, but the changes stay on this page: your installed app is not touched.

1. Under Appearance → Theme, click the Dark tile. The whole window turns dark at once.
2. Click in Search settings… and type zoom. Settings from every page that match appear together, under the name of their page.
3. Clear the search (press Esc once), click Canvas on the left and drag the Handle radius slider. The five dots in the preview grow and shrink with it.
4. Back on Interface, click Custom next to UI scale and drag the slider. Everything in the window gets bigger or smaller.

Try itSettings

Settings

Interface

Theme, language and the size of everything on screen.

0 of 5 done

1. Pick the Dark theme under Appearance.
2. Search for “zoom” at the top of the window.
3. Open the Canvas page in the list on the left.
4. Change the joint handles: drag Handle radius or flip a switch.
5. Choose Custom UI scale and drag its slider.

The settings worth changing first

Find a setting by name

You don’t need to know which page a setting is on.

1. Click Search settings… at the top of the window and type part of its name, like loop or handle.
2. The page shows Settings matching “loop”, grouped under Interface, Canvas or Animation. The controls in the results work exactly like on their own page.
3. Press Esc to clear the search and go back to the page you were on. A second Esc closes Settings.

Interface: theme, language, size, touch and timeline

• Theme: three picture tiles, System, Light and Dark. The theme recolours the editor’s panels and windows, not your figures or your scene.
• Language: the whole editor switches at once. If a translation isn’t finished yet, a yellow note says Some controls are still shown in English.
• UI scale: Automatic picks a size for your screen and says which (Matches your screen: 100%). Custom lets you drag the slider from 75% to 200%; the round arrow next to it, Back to automatic scale, undoes it. This is a desktop app setting: in a browser it is greyed out and says to use the browser’s zoom (Ctrl+= and Ctrl+-).
• Touch: Touch interface (Automatic, On, Off) and Draw with a finger (Until a pen is used, Always, Never). See Pens, tablets and touch screens.
• Timeline: two tiles, Advanced (keys on layers) and Simple (Pivot-style frame cards). Switching never changes your animation. See Simple or Advanced.
• Workspace → Reset panel layout puts every panel back where it started. It doesn’t touch the theme, your shortcuts or your animation.

Canvas: zooming, selecting and the joint dots

• Zoom gesture: with Ctrl + scroll to zoom (the default), the wheel scrolls the view and Ctrl+wheel zooms. With Scroll to zoom, the wheel zooms by itself, like many drawing apps. Pinching on a trackpad always zooms.
• Box selection: when you drag a box on an empty spot, Figure origins (the default) selects the figures whose orange origin is inside it; Figure bounds selects every figure the box touches.
• Pasted figure depth: pasted figures keep the depth they were copied with (Same Z-index), or go In front of everything on the layer.
• Alt-drag a figure root: Alt-dragging a figure’s origin makes a Linked instance (it changes when you edit the original in Build) or an Independent copy. Pick this before you duplicate a figure you plan to redesign.
• Joint handles: Show handles, Show unselected figures (the blue dots of the figures you haven’t selected), Automatic size (smaller dots when you zoom out), Outline handles and Handle radius. The preview under the slider shows all five kinds of dot: selected joint (red), figure origin (orange), unselected joint (blue), joined joint (white) and static joint (grey).
• Canvas overlays: Virtual camera shows the camera’s frame; Motion paths shows the paths (also M).
• Figure builder: static handles, highlighting the selected segment, and a construction background colour that only Build shows.
• Graphics mode: Automatic, Canvas 2D or WebGPU. Leave it on Automatic; Canvas 2D is the one to try if the canvas is blank or flickers.

Animation: playback and autosave

• Replace keyframes on drop (on): dragging keys onto other keys in the Advanced timeline replaces them. Turn it off and occupied frames refuse the drop instead.
• Playback quality: Normal (100%), Medium (75%), Low (50%), Draft (25%) or Automatic. Only the preview while playing gets lighter; editing and exports always use full quality.
• Loop animation (on): playback starts again from the first frame at the end.
• Fit view when playback starts (on): pressing Play shows the whole scene. Turn it off to keep your zoom.
• Autosave interval: Off, 2.5 seconds (the default), 5, 10 or 30 seconds, or 1 minute. This is how often a recovery copy of unsaved work is kept, in case the app or your computer crashes. It is not the same as saving: see Save, open and recover.

Shortcuts and Feedback

Shortcuts lists every command with its keys. Click a key to record a new one, add up to four, or reset them. It is explained step by step in Change keyboard shortcuts. Under the list, Pen and tablet shows what a pen does.

Feedback (desktop app) has three tiles: Report a bug, Share an idea and Other feedback, plus My reports for the developer’s replies. See Get help and report a bug.

Privacy and Donate

In the desktop app, two more buttons sit at the bottom of the list on the left:

• Privacy and diagnostics…: choose whether anonymous usage numbers and error reports are shared. Your animations, file names and text are never included. The same window is in Help → Privacy & diagnostics.
• Donate: StykAnimate is free; this opens its Ko-fi page if you want to support it.

Updates are not in Settings: use Help → Check for updates…. See Install StykAnimate.

What Settings doesn’t change

Settings belong to your copy of StykAnimate, not to a project. Send someone your .styk file and they see your animation with their own theme, handles and shortcuts. The size of the scene, its frame rate and background, your figures’ colours and the camera are part of the project: change them in Scene settings and in Properties.

Common questions

Keep going