Workspace

The first time you open Formo, there's a lot on screen. Don't worry about it. It's really just a few areas, each with one job. Once you know what's where, the rest gets easy.

When you open Formo, you will see a workspace like this.

TL;DR:

- The screen is: canvas in the center, toolbar across the top, layers listed on the left, properties on the right, and the timeline appearing over the canvas when you need it. The canvas is effectively endless; get around it with the scroll wheel, Ctrl to zoom. The layers tree saves you when the canvas gets crowded. Rulers, guides, and snapping keep things aligned automatically. Nothing's ever risky: Ctrl+Z undoes anything.

- The canvas is effectively endless; get around it with the scroll wheel, Ctrl to zoom.

- The layers tree saves you when the canvas gets crowded.

- Rulers, guides, and snapping keep things aligned automatically.

- Nothing's ever risky: Ctrl+Z undoes anything.

The document panel

In the upper-right part of the workspace, there is a panel displaying document-level settings.

· You can specify the document name
· You can choose the document background color
· Export: you can export the whole document, some frame, or camera view as an interactive HTML or JS file, ready to preview or download

The main menu

By clicking the Formo logo in the top-left corner you can open the main app menu:

· Save: Save a copy of your project to your computer. Your work is already saved automatically
· Load: opens a saved project file from your computer
· Change the editor’s appearance, including the dark or light theme, and other general behavior settings
· Snap to pixel grid: when checked, things you draw or move line up neatly to the pixel grid
· About Formo: shows the version and credits

Understand the workspace layout

When you start working in Formo, the workspace looks like this.

The workspace can be broadly divided into several areas.

(A) Left panel: the logo and menu button, the Layers/Tween header, the list of everything in your document, and the Library below it (your Components and Shaders). This is where you navigate and organize what you're building.

(B) Toolbar — A floating set of creation tools sitting over the canvas: select, frame, paint bucket, rectangle, ellipse, arrow, pen, text, eyedropper, and comment. Play and Help sit as small quick actions in the opposite corner.

(C) Canvas: the file's main workspace, where you create and manipulate your drawing. Rulers along the top and left edge show real measurements as you work.

(D) Right panel: shows the properties of whatever's selected: transform, fill, stroke, appearance, effects, events, and methods for an object — or, with nothing selected, the document's own colors, custom properties, and export settings instead.

Toolbar and modes

The toolbar sits at the top-left of the canvas by default, but its position can be changed as desired, and what's in it changes depending on which mode you're in. Click the small mode switcher above the tool list (or use Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+4) to jump between them.

Prototype (Ctrl+1) is the default, general-purpose mode for prototyping with vector elements, and carries the fullest toolset of the four: Pointer, Frame, Component, Rectangle, Ellipse, Arrow, Pen, Text, Eyedropper, and Comment, plus each of their flyout alternates (Laptop/Mobile/Section/Group under Frame; Star/Polygon under Ellipse; Line under Arrow; Image under Rectangle). This is where most of the building happens — laying out shapes, structuring frames and components, getting the bones of a scene down — before you move into a more focused mode for hand-drawn work, rigging, or interactivity. It's the mode you'll likely spend the most time in outside of dedicated drawing sessions, and it's the one selected by default when you open Formo.

Draw (Ctrl+2) swaps in a dedicated brush toolbar (the brush itself with its nib and pressure settings, sculpt, and the paint bucket), separate from Prototype mode's general shape tools. This is the focused hand-drawing mode, built around freehand ink rather than structural layout.

Animate (Ctrl+3) narrows the toolbar down to just Pointer and the Skeleton/Bone rigging tools. This is where character rigging happens specifically (building bone chains and posing them), kept separate from general drawing and layout work.

UI (Ctrl+4) brings in a different set entirely, those tools are mostly for developers: Pointer, List, Camera, Controls, and Audio. This is the mode for scene-level and interactive elements — placing a camera, wiring up input controls, dropping in sound — the pieces that make a scene behave like an interactive experience rather than a static drawing.

Organize your project with the left Layers panel

At the top, the Layers header sits next to the Formo logo/menu button and a Tween › toggle. Click it to reveal the timeline when you're ready to animate. Below that is the actual layers list: every object in your document, one row each, indented to show nesting (a shape inside a frame shows as a child row underneath it).

The layers tree

Every object in your document shows up here as one row: shapes, groups, frames, brush layers, everything. Each row carries a small icon indicating what type of object it is, so you can tell a rectangle from a text layer from a component instance at a glance, without opening it.

Nesting. An object inside a frame, or a shape inside a group, indents underneath its parent, exactly like folders in a file browser. Containers with children show a small arrow/chevron next to them; click it to collapse or expand that branch, useful for tucking away a finished part of your scene you don't need to look at right now.

Selecting. Click a row to select that object. It highlights the same way it would if you'd clicked it directly on the canvas, and the two stay in sync either direction. Hold Shift or Ctrl while clicking to select multiple rows at once, the same modifier convention as selecting multiple objects on the canvas itself.

Reordering and reparenting. Rows aren't just a static list: drag one to a new position to reorder it, or drag it onto another row to move it inside that object entirely (making it a child of whatever you dropped it on). This is a real structural move, not just a visual reorder: dropping a shape onto a frame's row reparents it into that frame.

Renaming. Double-click a row's name to rename it in place.

Lock and visibility. Each row carries its own lock and visibility toggles on the right edge. Locking a row makes that object un-clickable on the canvas. You can still see it, and still select it from this list, but your mouse passes through it while working on everything around it. Visibility hides it from the canvas (and from export) without deleting anything.

Right-click. Right-clicking a row opens the exact same context menu you'd get right-clicking that object directly on the canvas; every action available from the canvas is available from the list too, so you never have to leave the tree to act on something in it.

Reuse assets with the Library

Sitting below the layers tree, in its own section, is the Library, currently split into Components and Shaders. This is deliberately separate from the live layers list above it: the tree shows what's actually placed in your current document right now, while the Library holds the reusable pieces (component definitions, shader presets) available to pull into it. Browsing your saved components doesn't clutter the list of what's on the canvas, and vice versa.

Work on the canvas

The canvas is the workspace itself — the surface everything you draw lives on. It sits in the center of the screen, with the toolbar floating over its top-left corner and rulers running along its top and left edges.

It's effectively unbounded. You're not working inside a fixed page size the way you might in a print-focused tool; you can pan and zoom to reach any part of it, and there's no hard edge where your drawing runs out of room. Zoom itself does have a real range, from 1% up to 6400%, which in practice covers everything from seeing an entire large scene at once to editing individual points at extreme close-up.

Background color. The canvas has its own settable background color, part of the document's own properties (found in the right panel when nothing's selected), not something baked into any individual shape.

Navigate with zoom and pan

Zoom

Hold Ctrl and scroll to zoom in or out. Zooming is centered on wherever your cursor currently is, not the canvas center, so you can zoom into a specific detail without having to re-pan afterward to get it back in view. Ctrl-0 to reset zoom to 100%. You could also use Ctrl+/Ctrl- to zoom in and out.

Pan

- Scroll normally to pan around; most mice and trackpads move the canvas in both directions this way.

- Hold Shift while scrolling to pan horizontally, useful on a mouse with only a vertical scroll wheel.

- Hold the middle mouse button and drag, if you'd rather pan by dragging than by scrolling.

Use rulers, guides, and snapping

Rulers

Real, measured rulers run along the top and left edges of the canvas, showing actual coordinates rather than a decorative strip. The tick marks and labels rescale automatically as you zoom, staying readable whether you're looking at the whole scene or one small corner of it.

Guides

Click and drag out from a ruler — top ruler for a horizontal guide, left ruler for a vertical one — to place a thin reference line across the canvas. Guides are an aid: line objects up against one deliberately, rather than eyeballing alignment freehand.

Snapping

While dragging an object, it naturally "catches" against the edges and centers of nearby objects, so two shapes line up cleanly without you having to fine-tune the position by eye. This is on by default and works alongside guides rather than instead of them.

There's a second, separate kind of snapping too: pixel-grid snapping, a toggle in the main Settings menu (checked by default) that snaps vertex and drag positions as you edit, honored by the pen tool, vector editing, and dragging alike. Turn it off when you need finer-than-pixel precision positioning instead.

Edit objects in the right panel

The right panel is context-driven: it shows different things depending on what's selected. With nothing selected, it shows document-level settings (Document colors, Properties, Export), topics covered in the "Document panel" subsection. Select an object, and it switches entirely to that object's own editable properties.

Here's what that looks like for a plain rectangle placed in a frame as the example.

The header. At the top: the object's type (Rectangle) and its id (Rect1, editable), plus a tags field.

Transform

- Position (X/Y): where the object sits. What these two numbers actually measure depends on a setting: by default it's the shape's min X and Y position in the container, but you can switch it to the shape's rotation pivot instead in Settings.

- Dimensions (W/H): width and height.

- Rotation: the angle, in degrees, plus three small icon buttons next to it: rotate, flip horizontal, and flip vertical.

- Corner radius: rectangle-specific (a star or polygon would show its own point-count/inner-radius fields here instead), how rounded the corners are.

Every number field in this section (and everywhere else in the panel) is scrubbable: click and drag up or down directly on the field instead of typing, and the value slides smoothly while the shape updates live on the canvas.

Fill. The object's fill — color, gradient, image, or shader — with a visibility toggle and an opacity percentage. This section can hold more than one fill stacked on top of each other, layered in paint order, not just a single flat color.

Stroke. The object's outline: weight, position (inside/center/outside the shape's edge), join style, and, for a dashed look, dash and gap length, settable independently.

Appearance. Overall opacity and blend mode (Normal, and the usual set of standard blend modes). This is distinct from the Fill section's own per-fill opacity; this one affects the whole object as a unit, on top of whatever its individual fills and strokes already look like.

Effects. Additional visual effects layered onto the object beyond its fill and stroke.

Events and Methods. These two sections are where Formo's reactive system becomes directly available to you, per-object, without needing a separate scripting panel. Events lets you attach handlers to things that happen to this specific object (a click, for instance). Methods lets you define callable functions on the object itself, so something elsewhere in the document can trigger Rect1.hit() (or whatever you name it) the same way you'd call a function in code — except it's scoped to this one object, and it's available from a formula anywhere else in the document.

Animate with the timeline

The timeline stays completely out of the way until you need it. Click the Tween › toggle next to the Layers header, and it appears as an overlay right over the top of the canvas, rather than sitting permanently docked somewhere. While you're just drawing, it's not open and not in your way at all. The moment you want to bring something to life, you open it and start placing keyframes.

The full mechanics (placing keyframes, independent per-part clocks, scrubbing and playback) are covered in the Frame-by-Frame Animation guide.

If you make a mistake

Any action undoes with the usual Ctrl+Z, and redoes with Ctrl+Shift+Z (or Ctrl+Y; both work). Feel free to experiment: everything's reversible.