Keyboard shortcuts

Every default key in Celas Studio, and how to rebind, clear or reset them in Preferences.

Celas Studio ships with 75 default shortcuts. They live in one list, split into two groups exactly as Preferences shows them: Tool Shortcuts, which are bare letters, and General Shortcuts, which are mostly Ctrl chords. Every one of them can be changed.

Bindings are stored once and resolved per platform. Where this page says Ctrl, macOS uses Command; the tables below call out the handful of places where macOS genuinely differs. Modifiers are matched exactly, so a bare-letter tool key can never be triggered by its Ctrl version: Ctrl+S saves and never picks up the Smudge tool, Ctrl+O opens and never toggles onion skin.

Tool shortcuts#

Single keys, no modifiers. These appear under Tool Shortcuts in Preferences, and are identical on Windows, Linux and macOS.

The set follows the common letters wherever a tool has one, so V, A, P, B, E, I, G, M, W, U, H, R and Z are where your fingers expect them. Transform is the one command-style key (Ctrl+T, Free Transform), and T is deliberately left free for the Text tool.

Hold a tool key instead of tapping it and the tool is only borrowed. Use it, let go, and the tool you were on comes back. A tap still switches for good. What makes the switch temporary is using the tool while the key is down, not how long you hold it.

General shortcuts#

Everything below is one list in Preferences, under General Shortcuts. It is grouped here by what the commands do.

Files#

Editing and selection#

Ctrl+D reads the context. With a marquee or floating pixel selection live it deselects: a floating selection is committed first, then the mask is cleared. With nothing selected pixel-side it duplicates the selected layers, which is what it means when you are working in the Layers panel or the Timeline. Exactly one of the two happens per press. The Edit menu shows the key beside whichever of Duplicate and Deselect All it currently means.

Ctrl+J closes the selected open path, the same operation as the Join button in the Node and Pen options bar: select both endpoints of the path first, or the key does nothing.

Painting and colour#

The bracket keys resize the preset of the Brush, Eraser and Smudge tools (the Pencil is not on that list, even though it owns a preset of its own), the same value the Size slider drives, so the cursor ring follows immediately. They step multiplicatively, which keeps them usable at 3 px and at 300 px. D and X work whether or not the Color panel is open, and both write to every selected shape in one undo step.

Ctrl+A reads the context before it acts. With the Layers panel or Timeline focused it selects every layer. Over the canvas with the Node or Pen tool on a Shape layer it selects every vertex. With a pixel tool active (Fill, Marquee or Magic Wand) or on a Raster Cells layer, it selects the whole canvas. Otherwise it falls back to selecting every layer.

Redo answers to two chords, Ctrl+Y and Ctrl+Shift+Z. Ctrl+Y is the one listed in Preferences and can be rebound; Ctrl+Shift+Z is a fixed alias that always works as well. On macOS the listed chord is Command+Shift+Z. Delete also answers to Backspace, and that alias is fixed too: it is not in the list and cannot be changed.

Arranging#

These act on the primary selected layer and run exactly what Layer ▸ Order and the toolbar order buttons run.

Animation and playback#

Space does double duty: held down over the canvas it is the pan modifier. Playback therefore toggles on release, and only when you did not drag while the key was held. Tab is suppressed while you are editing an Action.

Cel animation#

These act on the selected layers, so a press with nothing selected does nothing at all. Period steps back and comma steps forward, which is the reverse of the usual pairing: the two keys are read as directions, and on several layouts the period sits to the left of the comma.

View#

Hold Shift and Space and drag left or right for a continuous zoom under any tool. It is a fixed gesture rather than a rebindable shortcut, like Space for panning. See Moving around the canvas.

What Delete deletes#

Delete and Backspace run down a fixed list and stop at the first thing that applies:

1. With the References panel focused, they remove the selected reference picture.
2. With the Timeline focused, they delete the selected keyframes and nothing else. Alt+Q does the same there, as the opposite of Q.
3. With a key clicked on a motion path (the selected layer's path under the Move or Transform tool, or the selected bone's path under the Bone tool), they delete that key and leave the layer alone.
4. With the Bone tool active and a bone selected in Edit mode, they delete the selected bones: child bones are promoted, not destroyed.
5. With the Node tool active and vertices selected, they delete those vertices.
6. With a pixel selection active, they clear the pixels inside it.
7. Otherwise they delete the selected layers.

Keys that only work in one place#

These are fixed, not part of the rebindable list. Each one needs its panel or tool to be the thing you are pointing at.

macOS differences#

Command replaces Ctrl throughout, and physical Control must not be held. Bare-letter tool keys are unchanged. The key list itself is the same on all three platforms: every chord in the tables above works on macOS with Command in place of Ctrl.

What does differ is which of them the native menu bar prints beside a command. Duplicate and Deselect All deliberately carry no key equivalent in the macOS menu: an NSMenu key equivalent is consumed by the system before the app sees the keystroke, so whichever of the two claimed Command+D would win every press and the other would become unreachable. Leaving both unlabelled lets the shared context rule decide, exactly as on Windows and Linux. Onion skinning and Delete are unlabelled in the macOS menu for the same reason, and the O and Delete keys work as usual.

Rebinding a shortcut#

1. Open Preferences with Ctrl+, and go to the Shortcuts tab.
2. Find the action in Tool Shortcuts or General Shortcuts and click the button showing its current key.
3. The button turns red and reads Press key… Now press the key you want, holding any of Ctrl, Shift or Alt you want in the chord.
4. Press Esc instead to cancel, or Backspace to clear the binding and leave the action with no key.
5. Click OK, or Apply if you want to keep the window open. Bindings are written to disk and survive a restart.

Right-click a chord button to put that one binding back to its factory default. This is the only way to recover a binding you cleared with Backspace, because capture mode refuses to assign Escape, Backspace or Delete (they mean cancel and clear) and Delete is its own action's default.

Reset All to Defaults at the bottom of the tab puts all 75 bindings back at once, discarding every customisation.