Getting started

SpriteGrid opens with a blank 64 × 64 document, ready to draw on.

The window#

• Menus run along the top: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, View and Help.
• Tool options sit under the menus: the current tool's name, then its settings.
• Tools are down the left. A button with a small corner mark holds more than one tool: hold it, or right-click it, to pick another.
• The canvas is in the middle, with a tab for each open document. A dot on a tab means unsaved changes. Drag a tab to reorder it, or to the edge of the canvas area to see two documents side by side.
• The status bar is tucked into the canvas's bottom-left corner: the zoom (click it to type one), Fit, the canvas size (click it to change it), and the pixel under the pointer.
• Panels: Color and Layers on the right, the palette in a strip beside the canvas, and the Timeline under the canvas when a document is animated. Every other panel is in the View menu.

Drag a panel's tab to move it: onto another panel's tabs to join them, to the top or bottom of a panel to go above or below it, or anywhere else to give it a window of its own. Right-click a tab to close or collapse it. View ▸ Reset Panel Layout puts everything back.

A new document#

File ▸ New... (Ctrl+N) asks for a size. Pick a preset, like a 16 × 16 tile, a 32 × 64 sprite or a Game Boy screen, or type any width and height up to 4096. The /2 and x2 buttons halve or double a side.

Image ▸ Canvas Size... changes a document's size later, and Image ▸ Image Size... scales its pixels.

Opening and saving#

• File ▸ Open... (Ctrl+O) opens a SpriteGrid document (.spritegrid). Opening any other image makes a new document of it.
• File ▸ Open Image... opens PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, WebP, TGA, TIFF and QOI files.
• File ▸ Import Image Sequence... turns a folder of images into an animation, one frame each, in name order.
• Drag files onto the window: a .spritegrid opens, and a PNG or JPEG dropped on a canvas is pasted into that document.
• File ▸ Save (Ctrl+S) and Save As... (Ctrl+Shift+S) write a .spritegrid file, which keeps your layers, animation, slices and palette. File ▸ Open Recent lists the last ten.

A document opened from a PNG saves back to that PNG, flattened. To keep its layers, use Save As... and save it as a .spritegrid.

Moving around the canvas#

• Zoom: turn the mouse wheel, or pinch on a trackpad. Zoom snaps to whole steps, so pixels stay square.
• Pan: hold Space and drag, or drag with the middle button. On a trackpad, scroll with two fingers.
• Fit on Screen is Ctrl+0; Actual Pixels (100%) is Ctrl+1.
• At 800% and closer, a grid shows the pixels.
• View ▸ Tiling repeats the document around itself, to check that a tile or texture wraps seamlessly. Strokes wrap across the edges too.

Every change can be undone with Edit ▸ Undo (Ctrl+Z) and redone with Ctrl+Y.