User Interface

Last updated 7 August 2026

Backstage has no fixed layout. The interface is a set of windows you arrange yourself — dock them, tab them, float them onto a second monitor — and the arrangement is saved, so the machine comes back the way you left it.

That is worth knowing before anything else, because screenshots in this documentation show an arrangement, not the arrangement. If a window is not where a screenshot shows it, nothing is wrong.

Everything is a window

Every part of the interface is a window that can be moved, resized, docked against another, or pulled out to float on its own. Windows tab together when docked into the same place.

Open one from the View menu.
Or double-click the object it belongs to — a stepper opens the Stepper window, a CalibratorLite object opens Calibrator Lite, a web console opens the Page Editor. Usually faster than hunting through the menu.

In a default arrangement the central area holds the window you are working in — Scene View, Node Editor, Sequencer — with the Inspector and Output View docked to the right and the timeline windows across the bottom. Nothing about that is fixed.

Layouts are saved as workviews

A workview is a named arrangement of windows. Switching workview reconfigures the whole interface at once, which is how one machine serves several jobs: one layout for building the scene, another for programming show logic, another for running the show with only the monitoring windows visible.

Workviews are per user, and the active one saves itself while you work — not only when Backstage closes — so an arrangement survives a crash or a power loss.

The Inspector follows your selection

The Inspector has no content of its own. It shows the properties of whatever is currently selected, and the window you last selected something in decides what appears — a surface, an output, an asset, a sequencer event.

This is why most of Backstage has no settings dialogs: select the thing, edit it in the Inspector.

The same gestures work everywhere

Every pannable surface — Scene View, Node Editor, the sequencer timeline, the routing matrices — uses one navigation scheme. Learn it once.

Action	Gesture
Pan	Middle-drag, or a two-finger drag
Zoom	`Ctrl` + wheel, or pinch
Pan vertically	Wheel
Pan horizontally	`Shift` + wheel
Orbit (3D views)	`Alt` + middle-drag
Look (3D views)	`Shift`+`Alt` + middle-drag — turns the view without moving the eye, the way to reorient from inside a dome or a wrap-around screen

The wheel pans; zoom is Ctrl + wheel. This catches people who expect the wheel to zoom.

Built-in help

Guidance and tooltips — two independent toolbar toggles. One marks windows and controls with contextual hints; the other turns ordinary hover tooltips on and off.
Help graphs — press F1 for live, working node graphs that demonstrate a feature rather than describing it. Esc leaves one.

Undo

Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y apply across Backstage rather than per window — scene edits, node graph changes, sequencer edits and routing all share one undo history.

In this section

Interface — every window and what it is for, with a reference page for each

Use Guidance and Tooltips — the guidance and tooltip toggles in detail

Read the Performance Overview — reading the Performance Overview window

Scene Objects — the scene objects you build an installation from, each with its own reference page

Use Workviews to Save Window Layouts — saving and switching workviews

https://brainsalt.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BXHELP/pages/509509633 — the Settings window, for what is configured once per server

Control Backstage from a Web Browser (Remote UI) — the same interface in a browser, over the Remote UI