User guide

New to the app? Start with the Beginner tutorials for step-by-step projects, screenshots, and editable checkpoints.

This guide walks through the workspace as it exists in v0.5.6. PiVo Craft is a working release with advanced subsets — not a complete feature set.

Workspace layout

• Document tabs — New/Open adds tabs. Click a tab to switch; × closes it with a dirty-confirmation prompt. Every tab keeps its own history, selection, view, colors and dirty state, with document-scoped recovery slots.
• Panels — drag panel headings (or use their arrow controls) to dock and reorder; docks are resizable and settings persist. Left/right panels, bottom/side timeline layouts are supported.
• Layers — layers/groups with visibility, locks, opacity/blend controls, editable names and ordering.
• Keyboard bindings — editable, validated bindings with conflict/reservation detection. Mod means Ctrl/Cmd. Import/export as .pxkeys, or reset to defaults.

Drawing

• Tools: pencil, eraser, line, rectangles/ellipses, fill, linear gradient, rectangular selection, magic wand, cel/selection translation and eyedropper.
• Brush size/opacity and several inks; basic 1px corner cleanup (pixel-perfect baseline mode); horizontal mirror and wrap-drawing options.
• Pattern modes — cursor stamps, captured-source/canvas tiling and destination/stroke-origin tiling. The native-pixel lattice is independent of footprint scale/rotation; phase metadata is portable.
• Custom brushes — capture RGBA brushes from selections, stamp colored/masked, set anchors and rotation, store 10 local preset slots, import/export as .pxbrush.
• Dynamics — pressure/velocity-driven size, opacity and angle, with timestamp sampling, arc-length spacing and distance-lag stabilization. Mouse pressure is constant; pen verification used simulated input, not calibrated hardware.

Color, palettes and modes

• Original dark workspace plus a light theme (Sun/Moon button near Help). The explicit choice persists locally; without one, the editor follows OS color preference. Themes change chrome and viewport checker/grid/selection colors only — never artwork pixels, palettes, exports or history.
• Palette/color controls, layers, groups, visibility/locks, opacity and blend modes.
• Mode conversion — RGBA, indexed and grayscale conversion with frame-dependent palette edits. Indexed color adjustments require an explicit mode conversion.
• Gradient ramps — independent pressure/velocity/stroke-length ramps: FG→BG or palette, continuous or discrete stops, indexed quantization.
• Pixel-vote resampling — palette-preserving transform resampling alongside nearest-neighbor; a weighted inverse neighborhood with a documented foreground-retention bias (a deliberate style/quality tradeoff, not a universal improvement).

Selection & transforms

• Selection transforms and clipboard are raster implementations. Integer flips and 90° rotation, canvas resize with nearest-neighbor scaling, inversion and an internal raster clipboard are available.
• Numeric transform — arbitrary rotation, scale, pivot and translation with inverse nearest-neighbor sampling, selection/copy behavior and single-step undo.

Animation

• Frames with durations, copy/empty frames, Continuous/linked cels, unlink, timeline with tags and playback, onion skin, preview.
• Pressure/velocity/stroke-length dynamics feed animation strokes via paintDynamic (see Headless API).

Adjustments & text

• Preview/cancel/apply for brightness–contrast, HSL adjustments, gamma, piecewise RGB/channel curves, invert, grayscale and RGBA replacement — scoped to the active image, layer or all frames, with linked-image deduplication.
• Raster text — multiline content, local fonts, bold/italic, outline, and binary or antialiased glyph masks. Output depends on the browser/OS; hinting and desktop glyph-equivalence are not promised.

Tilemap

• A starter embedded 8×8 tilemap layer with tile placement and Manual/Auto/Stack pixel modes.

Theming details

• Slim, theme-aware scrollbars across panels, tool rail, timeline tracks, tabs, dialogs and toolbars.
• Outfit Variable typography with a role-specific scale (19px/700 branding, 11px/650 panel headings, 12px main controls, 11px captions with tabular numbers, 21px/650 dialog titles). Fonts and icons (Lucide) are bundled locally — no CDN.

See Workspace internals for state ownership, limits, recovery behavior and deferred floating/split/history features.