LightweightWhiteboard:Getting Started

This page shows how to open a board and what the parts of the board are.

Opening a board

There are three ways to get a board:

• New board: run Whiteboard: New Whiteboard from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). An unsaved board named whiteboard-1.whiteboard opens. Each further new board in the same session gets the next number.
• Existing board: open any .whiteboard file, for example from the Explorer. It opens in the board directly.
• PNG image: open a .png file, then run View: Reopen Editor With... and choose Whiteboard (edit PNG).

A new board is white and has the size from the settings vscWhiteboard.defaultWidth and vscWhiteboard.defaultHeight (default 1920 × 1080 pixels). See Commands and Settings.

The board with toolbar, color bar and status bar

The parts of the board

Toolbar

The top row holds the tools and actions, from left to right:

Group	Buttons
Freehand	Pen, Eraser
Shapes	Line, Arrow, Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle
Color tools	Fill bucket, Pick color
Images	Insert image...
Tool options	Size slider, Outline and Filled buttons, Tolerance slider. Only the options that fit the current tool are shown.
History	Undo, Redo, Clear board
Zoom	Zoom out, current zoom level, Zoom in, Fit to window

Hover over a button to see its name and its key. See Drawing Tools and Zoom and Pan.

Color bar

The second row shows the current color, a fixed palette of 16 colors and your own colors under My colors. See Colors.

Board

The white area in the middle is the board. Around it is a margin in the background color of your VS Code theme. Transparent areas of an opened PNG are shown with a light gray checkerboard. You can drop images onto the board. See Images.

Status bar

The bottom row shows, from left to right:

• a short hint for the current tool or for an image that is not placed yet
• the pointer position in board pixels, while the pointer is over the board
• the size of the board in pixels, for example 1920 × 1080 px

What the board remembers

Each open board remembers its tool, color, size, fill mode and tolerance while the tab is open. A board that you open for the first time starts with:

Option	Start value
Tool	Pen
Color	Black (#000000)
Size	4 px
Fill mode	Outline
Tolerance	20 %

The color picker tool is never remembered. If it was active, the board comes back with the pen.