Changing the Canvas Background

Each tab has its own canvas backdrop: a pattern, a canvas colour, a pattern colour, and an opacity, all stored per tab. You change them from the Tab Appearance dialog, a focused modal that gives these controls plenty of room.

Opening the dialog

Right-click the empty canvas to open the canvas menu, then choose Change Canvas. The Tab Appearance dialog opens on its Canvas tab. (Choosing Change Theme from the same menu opens the very same dialog on its Theme tab.) The dialog has a tab strip below its header, so once it is open you can switch between Canvas and Theme freely.

Every control applies live to the active tab as you click, so the canvas updates behind the dialog. There is no Apply or Cancel step: the dialog is an editor, not a wizard, and closing it with the X, Escape, or a backdrop click simply dismisses it.

The Canvas tab

The Canvas tab gathers the backdrop controls:

• Pattern is a grid of background patterns. The dialog has room to show them all at once, including static textures like Grid, Lines, Graph, Crosshatch, and Stripes, and a set of gentle animated patterns (Flow, Drift, Aurora, Ripple, Ribbons) that bring the canvas to life with soft ambient motion.
• Colours offers a Canvas colour swatch (the backdrop fill) and a Pattern colour swatch (the lines or glyphs drawn on top).
• Opacity is a slider with a percentage readout that fades the pattern in or out.
• Size is a slider (50% to 200%) that scales each pattern tile, so you can make a grid finer or coarser.

The animated patterns are theme-matched and reduced-motion safe: if you prefer reduced motion, each one simply freezes on a pleasant still frame.

The Theme tab

The same dialog also hosts the Theme tab, where a two-level category browse (Cool, Warm, Dark, Multi-colour, Formal, plus a Basic quick-pick) lets you recolour the whole tab. Picking a theme also updates the tab's backdrop to match. Learn more in Themes.