12 Settings

Ch. 12 ⚙️ UI Customization & Settings

What you'll learn: How to configure DRAW to your taste — the eight-tab settings dialog, theming, panel docking, and the various ways DRAW.cfg works under the hood.

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Settings Dialog — All 8 Tabs Explained

🎯 Goal: Configure DRAW to your preferences.

Open the settings dialog with Ctrl+, (comma) or Edit → Settings. The dialog has eight tabs covering every persistent option.

Tab	What it controls
General	Display scale, fullscreen toggle, FPS limit, UI scaling.
Grid	Default grid size, geometry, alignment, snap state, crosshair appearance.
Palette	Default palette, recent-palettes list size, Lospec UI visibility.
Panels	Default visibility for Toolbox, Layers, Edit Bar, Advanced Bar, Preview, Character Map, Drawer, Color Mixer.
Audio	SFX and music enable/disable, master volume, mute.
Fonts	Default font and size, paths to scan for TTF/OTF.
Appearance	Various color scheme configurations.
Directories	Where DRAW looks for templates, palettes, music.

DRAW.cfg

DRAW.cfg is a plain-text key/value file that lives next to the executable. You can hand-edit it any time. There are also OS-specific variants — DRAW.linux.cfg, DRAW.macOS.cfg, DRAW.windows.cfg — that override the base file when present.

CLI flags:

• --config /path/to/your.cfg — use a non-default config file.
• --config-upgrade — reconcile your existing config with any new defaults introduced by an upgrade. Recommended after each release.

Theming — Icons, Colors & Sounds

🎯 Goal: Customize DRAW's look and feel.

A theme is a folder under ASSETS/THEMES/ that contains:

• A THEME.CFG file with all UI colors.
• A directory of icon PNGs (replaceable per theme — see ASSETS/THEMES/DEFAULT/IMAGES/).
• A SOUNDS/ folder of WAV/OGG files (per-theme SFX).
• A MUSIC/ folder of tracker tunes that play on startup or via the Audio menu.
• A FONTS/ folder of bitmap and vector fonts.
• A splash.png for the launch animation.

Anything you can theme — UI palette, transform-overlay frame, smart-guide colors, layer panel highlights — lives in THEME.CFG. No recompile is required; DRAW reloads themes at runtime.

Display & Toolbar scale

• Display Scale — 1× through 8×. Suits HiDPI monitors.
• Toolbar Scale — 1× through 4×. Independent of display scale, so you can have small toolbar icons on a HiDPI display.

Panel Layout & Docking

🎯 Goal: Arrange panels for your workflow.

Dockable panels

Panel	Toggle
Toolbox	Tab
Layer Panel	Ctrl+L
Edit Bar	F5
Advanced Bar	Shift+F5
Character Map	Ctrl+M
Preview Window	F4
Drawer	(Organizer / View menu)
Color Mixer	View → Color Mixer

Each can be docked left or right by Ctrl+Shift+clicking on the panel itself.

UI master toggles

• F11 — toggle all UI (canvas-only mode).
• Ctrl+F11 — keep only the menu bar.
• F10 — toggle the status bar.

DRAW also supports auto-hide while drawing: panels fade out so they don't obscure your work, then return when the cursor leaves the canvas.

Cursor system

The cursor system uses your OS-native cursor for UI hovers and a custom-painted cursor for tool-specific feedback (crosshair on dot, brush footprint on brush, etc.). This is automatic and themeable.

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➡️ Next: Chapter 13 — Audio: Music & Sound Effects