In this tutorial, we'll learn how to create two views for the same drawing and place them side-by-side in Krita (version 5.2). In many graphics-related software, like Krita, it's possible to create two views for the same image that you're currently editing, such that changes in one view are reflected instantly in the other view. This allows us, for example, to work in a zoomed in area in one view while having a 100% zoom or 50% zoom preview of the entire image in another view.
To place two views side by side in Krita, follow the following steps:
1: with an image already open in Krita, click on Window -> New View -> (Image Title) on the menubar. The title of the image is its filepath for saved images, or "Unnamed" for new, unsaved images. This should create a new tab on the right side of the window for that image. Observe that you can zoom in and out in this new view and its zoom level is independent from the zoom level of the other view. If you edit the image in one view, the other view will automatically update to display the changes, since the data being displayed is the same. Unfortunately, because they're created as tabs, they aren't very useful as you need to switch tabs to see the image from another angle. But there is a way to make both views appear on a single window at the same time, even if you only have one screen.
2: click on Settings -> Configure Krita on the menubar. This will make Krita's settings dialog appear.
3: on the left side, where it says "General," "Keyboard Shortcuts," and so on, click on "General." This will display the general settings on the right side.
4: on the right side, you should now see the tabs "Cursor," "Window," "Tools," and others. Click on the "Window" tab.
5: the first window-related setting should be labelled "Multiple Document Mode," it's set to "Tabs" by default. Switch it to "Subwindows."
6: click on the OK button to save the settings. Doing so should make the tabs for the two views disappear, and they should turn into "subwindows" inside the Krita's main window's Multiple Document Interface (MDI).
7: if you can't see two subwindows, it's because one view is maximized. When one view is maximized, it can occlude the other view underneath it. On the top-right of Krita's main window, you'll find Krita's minimize, maximize / restaure, and close buttons, just like in any window. Similarly, each "subwindow" in a MDI interface has these three buttons as well. At the top-right, below Krita's window close button, you should see the maximized subwindow's close button, and to its left the restaure and minimize buttons. Clicking on the middle button will restaure it, making both subwindows visible. If they are still not visible, it's probably because one window is still over the other. You can drag them by their title bars to move them around. In some cases, if you drag a window too far, it goes beyond the visible area of the MDI, and the MDI gains scrollbars.
8: at this point, you can manually arrange the two views to be side by side. However, because the subwindows have titlebars, buttons, and borders, that can be a lot of wasted space, specially if you have a small screen. We can save some space by maximizing one of the two subwindows. As mentioned above, maximizing a subwindow hides the other subwindow since when a window gets focus it gets risen above all other, now inactive windows. Thankfully, there is a way correct this behavior. For this, you need to open the subwindow's context menu. This can be done with two methods: either by right clicking on the subwindow's title bar, or by left clicking on the icon on the left side of the subwindow's titlebar (which should be Krita's icon). Doing this will display a context menu with window-related settings.
9: on the subwindow's context menu, click on the option "Stay on Top." This will make the subwindow stay on top of other subwindows even when it's not the active window. Now you can make this subwindow your preview window and move it to one corner while maximizing the other subwindow to work on it, or vice-versa. It's also possible to create a third view with a different zoom, rotation, or mirror settings with this same process.
Video
Observations
Missing Setting: Krita's documentation mentions a Window -> Tile option that would place two views side by side. Strangely, I couldn't find it. I wonder if it was removed or is it a bug?
Comparison: Krita isn't as good as Clip Paint Studio when it comes to views. In CSP, it's possible to drag a tab to one side of the MDI and just drop it there to make two views side by side, that is, views in CSP are dockable. Krita has "dockers" which can be rearranged similarly, but views aren't programmed as dockers in Krita, so they lack this ability. Krita is also not as good as GIMP when it comes to views. Settings such as the visibility of guides are shared across views, so it's not possible to have on view with visible guides or a visible grid and another view without them. In GIMP, it's possible to have a view without guides, rulers, layer boundaries and that doesn't even show the selection's animated ant lines. Ironically, there's a bug in Krita where if you enable the grid in one view, it doesn't propagate to the other view until you click on it, so it's possible to hide the grid in one view then click on the other and enable it and it will only appear in that view until you click the first view by accident. Krita is better than FireAlpaca when it comes to views, since FireAlpaca only has tabs. The old version of AzPainter, available for Windows, didn't have views, but it had a docker that could display the canvas at certain zoom levels, such as 100% and 50%.
Weird Resize Behavior: one "feature" I noticed is that if you click outside the canvas on a view, sometimes Krita will resize the canvas to fill the whole space of the subwindow. I have no idea why this happens or why would anyone want this, but it's clearly intentional as there are even arrows that appear when clicking outside the canvas will resize the canvas. I have never triggered this deliberately. If doesn't happen if you just click outside the canvas normally, so it must have some very weird condition to trigger.
Missing Features: I think these views could be made more powerful if they were more customizable. As mentioned previously, many view-related settings are shared across all views, which makes having multiple views less useful than they could be. In particular, it would be interesting if you could make reference images visible only in one view, or make certain layers visible only in one view. Krita has a featured called "compositions" that lets you quickly make visible or hidden different sets of layers. It would be interesting if you could make a view display one composition while another view displays a different composition, for example. Views are currently not very useful for displaying images at specific sizes. For example, if I have a 512x512px image and I want to see how it looks scaled down to 32x32px, I'll have to do the math of how much zoom I need. At such small sizes, the borders of the subwindow can be distracting. Fortunately, there's a workaround in this case: using a clone layer and a transform layer to scale it to a specific size.
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