Changing the Canvas Background

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

Opening the Dialog

Click the paintbrush button in the bottom-right corner of the editor, beside the zoom controls (it is there on every screen size, phones included). The Tab Look & Feel dialog opens on its Theme tab; switch to its Canvas tab from the strip below the header. You can also run Open canvas options from the command palette, which opens the dialog straight on the Canvas tab.

The paintbrush is only there for people who can edit the tab, so it does not appear on a view-only link, in zen mode, or in Draw mode.

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 click outside it simply dismisses it. Each change is an ordinary edit, so undo takes it back.

The Canvas Tab

The Canvas tab gathers the backdrop controls:

• Pattern is a grid of background patterns, shown all at once. Fourteen are static: Grid, Blank, Lines, Graph, Crosshatch, Confetti, Stripes, Diagonal, Waves, Bricks, Isometric, Checkerboard, Hexagonal and Engineering. Five more, under Animated (Flow, Drift, Aurora, Ripple, Ribbons), bring the canvas to life with soft ambient motion. Hover a pattern for a one-line description.
• Colours offers a Canvas swatch (the backdrop fill) and a Pattern swatch (the dots, lines or marks drawn on top). Each opens the colour picker: soft and strong colours, the colours already used in the document, and Add a custom colour (four coloured dots) for one of your own. Confetti is multi-coloured, so it ignores the pattern colour.
• 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. Blank has nothing to scale.
• Speed appears only while an animated pattern is selected: a slider from 25% to 300% that sets how briskly the motion runs, from a barely-there drift to a lively stream.

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 and Font Tabs

The same dialog also hosts the Theme tab, where you browse themes by category (Default, Formal, Cool, Warm, Dark, Multi-colour and your own Custom themes) to recolour the whole tab. Picking a theme also resets the tab's backdrop to match, so choose the theme first and fine-tune the background afterwards. Learn more in Themes. The Font tab sets the tab's default typeface and text size; see Choosing Fonts.