What persists and what does not
Which settings survive closing Celas Studio, which travel inside your project file, and which reset the moment you reopen a dialog.
Celas Studio saves settings in two different places, and a few settings deliberately save nowhere. Knowing which is which explains why a dock layout survives a restart but a GIF export path does not, or why a rig comes back with the right auto-key channels armed no matter which machine opens it.
App-level settings: survive a restart, apply to every project
These live in the app data folder, not in any project file, so they follow you from one document to the next. See Where Celas Studio keeps its files for the exact filenames.
| Category | Examples | Persists? |
|---|---|---|
| Dock layout | Panel positions and sizes, floating vs. docked | Yes: imgui.ini |
| Panel visibility | Every Window-menu show/hide toggle, including Lock Panels | Yes |
| Preferences | Every setting on all four tabs: General, Appearance, Grid & Guides, Shortcuts | Yes |
| Keyboard shortcuts | All 57 rebindable bindings | Yes: shortcuts.cfg |
| Tool options | Around 80 per-tool settings: brush stabilise, fill tolerance, weight brush radius, and so on | Yes |
| Per-tool brush preset | Which preset the Brush, Pencil, Eraser and Smudge each had, one slot per tool | Yes |
| Brush library | Every preset with its parameters, custom tags and deletions, plus your captured tips | Yes: celasstudio_brushes.cbrushset |
| Keyframe Channels / Auto-Key Channels | Which of the twenty-nine channels each popup arms | Yes |
| Recent Projects | Up to 16 entries, most recent first | Yes |
| Viewport display | Grid, Center Cross, Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, Safe Area, snapping | Yes |
| Last workspace | Which workspace layout was active when you closed the app | Yes |
Project-level settings: saved inside the .cls
These are part of the scene itself. They travel with the file: opening the project on a different machine, or a different install, restores exactly what was there when it was saved.
- Canvas size, frame rate, frame count, Pixel Mode and Pixel Size, Motion Blur settings
- Playback state: current frame, Start/End, Looping, Ping-Pong, In/Out points
- Auto-key arming, Relative Keyframing and Auto-Freeze Keyframe
- Onion skin settings: enabled, opacity, position, before/after colours, active offsets
- Show Pre & Post Behaviors
- Share to Artwall: title, tags, description, type, size, visibility and Pixel Mode
- The palette, tag and group markers, and which sub-track groups are expanded on the Timeline
- The symbol library, Smart Actions and vertex welds
Resets every time: export dialogs
The five export dialogs remember some settings and deliberately forget others. Every one of them re-seeds its resolution and frame range from the canvas and the scene's in/out points on open, so those fields never carry over from your last export.
| Export dialog | What is remembered | What resets on every open |
|---|---|---|
| Image | Format, Quality, Background | Output path, Resolution, Frame |
| PNG Sequence | Format, Quality, Background | Output folder, Resolution, Start/End |
| Sprite Sheet | Format, Quality, Background, Columns, Spacing | Output path, Resolution, Start/End |
| Animated GIF | Loop, Colours, Dither, Background | Output path, Resolution, Start/End, and Frame Rate: it is re-snapped from the scene's fps every time |
| Video (MP4/WebM) | Format, Channels, Background, Include Audio, Lock Aspect, Timecode settings, and the output path | Resolution, Start/End, the Preset combo, and, despite being written to disk, FPS, Codec and Bitrate, which are re-seeded or force-reset (to the scene's fps, H.264, and Auto) on every open |
Never persisted, anywhere
- Which panel is collapsed to its tab strip by double-clicking a tab bar: this is session-only by design.
- The New Project orientation toggle, which goes back to Landscape on every launch.
- The Viewport view (burn-in overlay) checkbox is a single flag shared by all five export dialogs: turning it on in one turns it on in every other export dialog too, but it does not survive a restart.
- The right-click Delete on a user workspace asks first, then removes its layout file from disk, with no undo and nothing to restore it from.
One setting is worth calling out for honesty: Send anonymous crash reports, in Preferences ▸ General, is saved with the rest of your preferences, but sending a report is always a manual step: you choose Send Report in the dialog that appears after a crash. See Crash reports and privacy for how that actually works.