Toolbars and the chip HUD

Wayscriber’s default interface keeps drawing controls close to the canvas without a permanent side panel. Press F9 to show or hide the toolbars. Press F2 to cycle the top strip through full → micro → hidden.

Top strip

The full top strip is arranged as detached islands:

• Tools: drawing tools, the Shapes picker, Text, Sticky Note, Screenshot, and Highlight.
• Presets: 3–5 saved slots between Tools and History. A filled slot applies its saved tool profile; an empty slot saves the current profile.
• History: Undo, Redo, and the overflow menu.
• Chrome: an About button plus the pin and minimize controls. About opens the standalone About window (version, links, update status) and closes the overlay, because that window is a normal one and the overlay draws above those. Hide it from Customize if you would rather keep the strip narrower.

The presets island follows show_presets and is the first island removed when the viewport gets tight. Lower-priority controls then move into the overflow menu while Pen, Eraser, Undo, Redo, Clear, and the strip chrome stay reachable.

The overflow always provides three focused surfaces: Canvas…, Session…, and Settings…. Opening one closes the others. They remain available under the legacy panel layout as transient quick surfaces; under pill mode they are the canonical homes for those workflows.

Clear lives at the top of the overflow menu instead of occupying a permanent button. A normal click clears with a short Undo? action; Shift+click clears immediately. The E shortcut remains immediate.

After about four idle seconds, the islands dim and restore when the pointer approaches or drawing resumes. Set [ui] reduced_motion = "on" to make that transition snap instead of animate.

Contextual style pill

A second pill below the strip changes with the active tool. It is the single home for the current-color chip and quick-color swatches, plus the controls that matter now:

• stroke or eraser size;
• marker opacity;
• fill and auto-number options;
• text size and Sans/Mono selection;
• eraser brush/stroke mode;
• selection properties when the Select tool has an active selection.

Click a displayed px/pt value for precise keyboard entry. The quick-color row uses the first eight configured colors and keeps the R/G/B/Y/O/P/W/K shortcuts. Hiding top.group.quick-colors hides those swatches but deliberately keeps the current-color chip, so the full color picker remains reachable.

Micro mode and minimizing

The F2 cycle’s micro state is one 44px chip: the active tool glyph sits inside a ring drawn with the current color and stroke width. Click it to restore the full strip. The full/micro choice persists; the hidden step is runtime-only.

Minimize is separate from micro mode. It collapses a toolbar to an edge restore tab, while F9 is the direct show/hide toggle.

Interactive chip HUD

The status bar is a compact chip HUD rather than a passive text line. Depending on available space it shows board, page, current color, tool/size, text font, and Help. Its segments open the corresponding surface:

• board or page → board picker;
• color → color picker;
• tool/size → radial menu;
• Help → help overlay.

Set ui.status_bar_interactive = false if you prefer a display-only HUD whose clicks pass through to the canvas. Frozen, zoom, pan, and editing states appear as stacked badges above it.

Canvas popover and zoom chip

Choose Canvas… from the top strip’s ... overflow to reach the controls that formerly occupied the Canvas side pane. The popover contains five independently configurable sections:

• Boards: previous, next, new, duplicate, and delete;
• Pages: previous, next, new, duplicate, and delete;
• Advanced: undo/redo all, timed undo/redo, and Freeze;
• Zoom: zoom in, zoom out, reset, and lock;
• Step Undo/Redo: step buttons, counts, and optional delay sliders.

The existing show_boards_section, show_pages_section, show_actions_advanced, show_zoom_actions, show_step_section, and show_delay_sliders settings control those sections. There is no separate Canvas-popover configuration key.

When show_zoom_actions = true, a persistent chip in the bottom-right corner shows ⊖ NN% ⊕ Fit; while zoomed, it also adds Lock. The percentage is live, Fit returns to 100%, and the chip remains available whether the toolbar frontend is GTK4 or builtin Cairo. It replaces the old duplicate zoom status badge, so only one zoom percentage is shown.

Where the old side-panel functions went

ui.toolbar.side_layout = "pill" is the default. It does not create a standalone side palette:

• drawing properties live in the contextual style pill;
• canvas management lives in the Canvas… overflow popover, bottom-right zoom chip, and chip-HUD board picker;
• presets live in the top-strip presets island;
• Session and Settings open from the top strip’s overflow menu.

The Canvas, Session, and Settings popovers contain the same workflows as their former panes and scroll internally when needed.

side_layout = "panel" is the legacy escape hatch. It restores the classic Draw, Canvas, Session, and Settings side palette, including pane scrolling, collapsible sections, side pinning, and side minimizing. It is deprecated and planned for removal after one compatibility release. Panel-mode users receive a once-per-session notice that names each replacement surface.

Do not confuse side_layout with layout_mode: side_layout chooses pill versus legacy panel, while layout_mode = "simple" | "regular" | "advanced" chooses the baseline complexity of visible sections. Explicit shown/hidden choices survive a layout-mode change.

GTK4 and builtin frontends

Default builds include two frontends driven by the same control specification:

• GTK4 is selected automatically when Wayscriber can use separate layer-shell toolbar surfaces.
• Builtin uses Wayscriber’s Cairo renderer for forced-inline layouts, unsupported compositor paths, GTK-less builds, or GTK startup fallback.

Choose explicitly in config.toml:

[ui.toolbar]
backend = "auto" # auto, gtk, or builtin

For a one-off override, set WAYSCRIBER_TOOLBAR_BACKEND=auto|gtk|builtin. gtk is a request rather than a guarantee: Wayscriber warns and falls back to the builtin frontend when that path cannot run.

Visibility and ordering

The Settings popover and configurator can:

• switch Simple, Regular, or Advanced layout mode;
• show or hide supported tools, controls, and legacy-panel sections;
• reorder top tools, top controls, and side-section blocks;
• restore the built-in order;
• enable the optional ink-preview cursor, whose dot follows the current drawing color and width and includes the active tool glyph.

The configurator stores these choices as authored defaults under ui.toolbar in config.toml. The overlay Customize view uses those values as seeds and stores direct item visibility and order overrides in the generated $XDG_DATA_HOME/wayscriber/runtime-ui.toml file. Toolbar pin/minimized state, the active legacy pane, collapsed legacy sections, and board pins use that runtime file as well. Toolbar drag positions and authored choices such as section visibility continue to update their corresponding fields in config.toml.

Do not hand-edit runtime-ui.toml. Open Settings… to inspect its full path and status, reset runtime preferences, or recover from a failed save. See Configured defaults and runtime UI preferences.