.. meta:: :description: General Preferences in Krita. .. metadata-placeholder :authors: - Wolthera van Hövell tot Westerflier - Scott Petrovic - Greig :license: GNU free documentation license 1.3 or later. .. index:: Preferences, Settings, Cursor, Autosave, Tabbed Documents, Subwindow Documents, Pop up palette, File Dialog, Maximum Brush Size, Kinetic Scrolling, Sessions .. _general_settings: ================ General Settings ================ You can access the General Category of the preferences by first going to :menuselection:`Settings --> Configure Krita`. .. image:: /images/preferences/Krita_Preferences_General.png Cursor Settings --------------- Customize the drawing cursor here: Cursor Shape ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Select a cursor shape to use while the brush tools are used. This cursor will always be visible on the canvas. It is usually set to a type exactly where your pen nib is at. The available cursor types are shown below. Tool Icon Shows the currently selected tool icon, even for the freehand brush. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_tool_icon.png Arrow Shows a generic cursor. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_arrow.png Crosshair Shows a precision reticule. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_crosshair.png Small circle Shows a small white dot with a black outline. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_small_circle.png No Cursor Show no cursor, useful for tablet-monitors. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_no_cursor.png Triangle Right-Handed. Gives a small white triangle with a black border. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_triangle_righthanded.png Triangle Left-Handed. Same as above but mirrored. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_triangle_lefthanded.png Black Pixel Gives a single black pixel. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_black_pixel.png White Pixel Gives a single white pixel. .. image:: /images/preferences/Settings_cursor_white_pixel.png Outline Shape ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Select an outline shape to use while the brush tools are used. This cursor shape will optionally show in the middle of a painting stroke as well. The available outline shape types are shown below. (pictures will come soon) No Outline No outline. Circle Outline Gives a circular outline approximating the brush size. Preview Outline Gives an outline based on the actual shape of the brush. Tilt Outline Gives a circular outline with a tilt-indicator. While Painting... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Show Outline This option when selected will show the brush outline while a stroke is being made. If unchecked the brush outline will not appear during stroke making, it will show up only after the brush stroke is finished. This option works only when Brush Outline is selected as the Cursor Shape. .. versionchanged:: 4.1 Used to be called "Show Outline When Painting". Use effective outline size .. versionadded:: 4.1 This makes sure that the outline size will always be the maximum possible brush diameter, and not the current one as affected by sensors such as pressure. This makes the cursor a little less noisy to use. Cursor Color: The default cursor color. This is mixed with the canvas image so that it will usually have a contrasting color, but sometimes this mixing does not work. This is usually due driver problems. When that happens, you can configure a more pleasant color here. .. _window_settings: Window Settings --------------- Multiple Document Mode This can be either tabbed like :program:`GIMP` or :program:`Painttool Sai`, or subwindows, like :program:`Photoshop`. Background image Allows you to set a picture background for subwindow mode. Window Background Set the color of the subwindow canvas area. Don't show contents when moving sub-windows This gives an outline when moving windows to work around ugly glitches with certain graphics-cards. Show on-canvas popup messages Whether or not you want to see the on-canvas pop-up messages that tell you whether you are in tabbed mode, rotating the canvas, or mirroring it. Enable Hi-DPI support Attempt to use the Hi-DPI support. It is an option because we are still experiencing bugs on windows. Allow only one instance of Krita An instance is a single entry in your system's task manager. Turning this option makes sure that Krita will check if there's an instance of Krita open already when you instruct it to open new documents, and then have your documents opened in that single instance. There's some obscure uses to allowing multiple instances, but if you can't think of any, just keep this option on. .. _tool_options_settings: Tools Settings -------------- In docker (default) Gives you the tool options in a docker. In toolbar Gives you the tool options in the toolbar, next to the brush settings. You can open it with the :kbd:`\\` key. Brush Flow Mode In Krita 4.2 the behavior of flow in combination with opacity was changed. This allows you to turn it back to the 4.1 behavior. This will however be removed in future versions. Switch Control/Alt Selection Modifiers This switches the function of the :kbd:`Ctrl` and :kbd:`Alt` keys when modifying selections. Useful for those used to Gimp instead of Photoshop, or Lefties without a right :kbd:`Alt` key on their keyboard. Enable Touchpainting This allows finger painting with capacitive screens. Some devices have both capacitive touch and a stylus, and then this can interfere. In that case, just toggle this. Activate transform tool after pasting .. versionadded:: 4.2 A convenience feature. When enabling this, the transform tool will activate after pasting for quick moving or rotating. Kinetic Scrolling (Needs Restart) This enables kinetic scrolling for scrollable areas. .. figure:: /images/preferences/Krita_4_0_kinetic_scrolling.gif :align: center Kinetic scrolling on the brush chooser drop-down with activation mode set to :guilabel:`On Click Drag`, with this disabled all of these clicks would lead to a brush being selected regardless of drag motion. Activation How it is activated. On Middle-Click Drag Will activate when using the middle mouse button. On Touch Drag Will activate if it can recognize a touch event. May not always work. On Click Drag Will activate when it can recognize a click event, will always work. Sensitivity How quickly the feature activates, this effective determines the length of the drag. Hide Scrollbar Whether to show scrollbars when doing this. .. _file_handling_settings: File Handling ------------- .. versionadded:: 4.2 Enable Autosaving Determines whether or not Krita should periodically autosave. Autosave Every Here the user can specify how often Krita should autosave the file, you can tick the checkbox to turn it off. For Windows these files are saved in the %TEMP% directory. If you are on Linux it is stored in /home/'username'. Unnamed autosave files are hidden by default This determines whether the filename of autosaves has a period prepended to the name. On Linux and Mac OS this is a technique to ensure the file is hidden by default. Create Backup File When selected Krita will, upon save, rename the original file as a backup file and save the current image to the original name. The result is that you will have saved the image, and there will be a copy of the image that is saved separately as a backup. This is useful in case of crashes during saves. Backup File Location The default location these backups should be stored. Same Folder as Original File Store the file in the same folder as the original file was stored. User Folder This is the main folder of your computer. On Linux and Mac OS this is the 'Home' folder, on Windows, the 'c:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME' folder (where YOUR_USER_NAME is your windows username). Temporary File Folder This stored the file in the temp folder. Temp folders are special folders of which the contents are emptied when you shut down your computer. If you don't particularly care about your backup files and want them to be 'cleaned' automatically, this is the best place. If you want your backup files to be kept indefinitely, this is a wrong choice. Backup File Suffix The suffix that will be placed after the full filename. 'filename.kra' will then be saved as 'filename.kra~', ensuring the files won't show up in Krita's open file dialog. Number of Backup Files Kept Number of backup files Krita keeps, by default this is only one, but this can be up to 99. Krita will then number the backup files. Compress \*.kra files more. This increases the zip compression on the saved Krita files, which makes them lighter on disk, but this takes longer to load. Use Zip64 Kra files are zip files. Zip64 allows you to use .. _misc_settings: Miscellaneous ------------- When Krita starts This is the option for handling user sessions. It has the following options: Open Default Window This opens the regular empty window with the last used workspace. Load Previous Session Load the last opened session. If you have :guilabel:`Save session when Krita closes` toggled, this becomes the last files you had open and the like. Show Session Manager Show the session manager directly so you can pick a session. .. versionadded:: 4.1 Save session when Krita closes Save the current open windows, documents and the like into the current session when closing Krita so you can resume where you left off. .. versionadded:: 4.1 Upon importing Images as Layers, convert to the image color space. This makes sure that layers are the same color space as the image, necessary for saving to PSD. Undo Stack Size This is the number of undo commands Krita remembers. You can set the value to 0 for unlimited undos. Favorite Presets This determines the amount of presets that can be used in the pop-up palette. Hide splash screen on startup. This'll hide the splash screen automatically once Krita is fully loaded. .. deprecated:: 4.1 Deprecated because Krita now has a welcome widget when no canvas is open. Enable Native File Dialog This allows you to use the system file dialog. By default turned off because we cannot seem to get native file dialogues 100% bugfree. Maximum brush size This allows you to set the maximum brush size to a size of up to 10.000 pixels. Do be careful with using this, as a 10.000 pixel size can very quickly be a full gigabyte of data being manipulated, per dab. In other words, this might be slow. Recalculate animation cache in background. Krita will recalculate the cache when you're not doing anything. .. versionchanged:: 4.1 This is now in the :ref:`performance_settings` under :guilabel:`Animation Cache`.