Studio windows / plugin widgets almost never save their locations

[LMH_Hutch (Hutch)]

Every once and a while I decide my studio layout isn’t ideal for what I’m doing, so I try and change it up.

Nice! This should work good for me, let me just restart studio and make sure it’s all still in the right spot.

Oh. That’s not right. What if I try and just move one window/widget at a time, maybe that’ll work. I’ll try just putting the explorer beside the properties and then restart.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I can’t find a rhyme or reason why the windows either never save, or sometimes save their location and size. I can’t figure out why in play solo or start server windows pop up that shouldn’t, and I can’t figure out why some widgets refuse to stay open during different studio sessions. All I know is this behavior has plagued me for a long time. Making changes to windows in studio is always a huge gamble.

Repro steps:

1. Open studio and open a place file, or start a new place
2. Resize and reposition any studio widgets and windows
3. Close studio (up to you how you want to do that)
4. Reopen studio and open a place file, or start a new place
5. Observe the widgets and windows not in the same location

I can repro this behavior probably around 50% of the time, multiple resizes and changes seem to give a higher rate of occurrence, maybe 75%.

Over the past months I haven’t been able to find a definitive cause, and if anybody can contribute useful information as to the source of this bug, please do so.

[JustDevv]

This is really frustrating for me too - I try to position some windows on my 2nd monitor but they never save their locations.

[Maelstronomer]

yup, it’s a problem for me too and it’s seemingly random, or something like that

[Aotrou (Shawn)]

Has been a common enough issue for me as well. If the toolbox widget isn’t in it’s usual spot on my second monitor, it’s hidden somewhere behind my Studio window, and I have to disable then enable the widget to get it to the front so I can move it back to it’s proper spot.

A minor issue as far as bugs go, but an annoying one and worth the report.

Huge support!

[Intended_Pun]

For me, the most annoying thing is having random windows open when I didn’t want them to (e.g. plugin windows). It’s also annoying when I minimize a server window only to have all my windows minimize the next time I start one.

[nsgriff (griffted)]

Submitted internally.

We will take a look, and I’ll keep this thread updated when we begin looking at this.

[opplo]

• Moved from a duplicate thread:

Every time I open Studio the panels (properties, explorer, etc) are in a different place to where I left them when I exited Studio previously. I have to re-position the panels every time I open studio.

This has been occurring now for maybe 8 months or longer. I’ve since used 3 different laptops, including my previous Roblox work laptop and had the exact same issue on all of them. I suspect it may be to do with my specific panel layout and Studio not being able to save it for some unknown reason (I can’t think of any other reason considering I have changed laptop 3 times and I can’t imagine it being connected to my account).

How panels are intended to be positioned:

How it was directly after I exited Studio and loaded up the same place:

What can also happen on occasion:

This happens repeatedly every time. I encourage someone to try the same panel layout as me, exit and rejoin and see if the configuration saves.

Edit: Seems as though other panel layouts save, just not my specific one.

[BuildIntoGames (Preston)]

This has been happening to me for over a year. Really frustrating

[nsgriff (griffted)]

We know the underlying cause and issue, but it requires a bigger project. We have not slated time for this work yet.

Thanks.

[BuildIntoGames (Preston)]

This is still the biggest productivity killer for me. Having to reorganize/position/scale all my Studio panels and widgets EVERY SINGLE TIME I F11 out or open Studio is agonizing.

Like every single modern ide, Studio SHOULD save where it left off. This is such an enormous QOL issue, and I can’t stress that enough. I understand this isn’t a priority atm but it should be. Could we please get an eta on this?

[LMH_Hutch (Hutch)]

I’m having this problem again. I’m not sure when it started but today I reorganized my studio windows and they refuse to stay in the positions I place them in when I open a new studio instance.

Exact same repro steps as the OP.

[LMH_Hutch (Hutch)]

Trying to organize studio windows right now is an absolute nightmare. There is no other way to describe it.

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(image gets cropped, click on it to see the whole thing)

While I was messing around in a team create I joined a team test session and had all of these windows open up. Aside from the toolbox none of the windows were open pre test join, and the toolbox was docked on a different part of my screen.

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I was using the terrain editor and undocked to position it in the corner of my viewport. When I was done I left the terrain window open and closed studio. Later on in the day I opened studio back up to find this:

The toolbox has replaced the terrain editor. One of the rare times studio actually remembered the position and size of a window, it just loaded a totally different plugin instead.

[bizbot19]

This is STILL happening to me and has been happening for over a year, extremely annoying and a waste of time every single day. Especially now that Smooth Terrain Tools and other Roblox tools are built as Lua Widgets, this has become unbearable.

I would go as far as to say that this is one of the driving reasons behind my decision to NOT use the Lua Widget Smooth Terrain toolset. My job is environment design and I do this every single day full time.

This needs to get fixed.

[Evercyan (Cyan)]

I’m having the same issue here!

When binding my Output toggle hotkey and then close and open it again, any widgets below it like the Properties window is not remembering the location I set everything to and it pushes up the more I use it, requiring me to adjust it again. This still happens when using the Output button under Studio > View.

[BuildIntoGames (Preston)]

I swear this is still my biggest pet peeve with Studio, years later. I’m this close to plucking out my F11 key. It is agonizing.

[Pcoi94]

2023, and same bug… Really annoying!

[Clxzed]

Months later and this is still 100% replicable, please fix this Roblox. It is annoying for me and my developers to have to get every plugin back in place.

[butterthebig]

Hi all, we’re closing out some older tickets that were never officially closed out. This one was submitted long before the docking changes last year, but even so we currently believe there to be no outstanding issues with losing docking layouts in Studio. That said there is likely some confusion as to how it works. If you do have a 100% repro on something related to this, please share here or create a new bug.

Saving layouts should work, but there are some restrictions we put in place a while back to alleviate some of the dreaded docking corruption issues. We are looking at lifting some of these restrictions in the near future as we roll out some more comprehensive fixes to corruption, but in the meantime here’s a few tips to make this make sense:

a) Layouts are saved to a single location for all instances in the registry (Win) or settings plist (mac)
b) Layouts are saved exactly once per instance, when the program exits.
c) Layouts are read exactly once, when the program starts.
d) Layouts for client/server tests are never saved.

So what this means is if you change a layout and then start another instance, either through File->New, or launching from taskbar/start menu/desktop you will not see those changes reflected. You need to first exit your instance of Studio that you want to keep the settings for, and then start Studio again.

So say you make changes on instance (A) , then start another instance (B) without those changes, then close A, then close B, then start another instance (C). What will happen is that A saves its changes, B saves its changes over A, then C loads B’s layout, and the changes to (A) are lost. So last to close “wins”.

Hope this helps keep this straight, and we’ll update if/when we can loosen these restrictions so the saves happen on change and not on exit.

Again, if you have another case where you see layouts being lost, please post them or start another bug with the exact repro steps.