The window

From top to bottom:

• Menus: File, Edit, View, Tools, Help. Help → About says which version you have and where OxiGuitar looks for plugins; it also has a Donate with PayPal button (it opens the page in your browser) and a QR code to scan with your phone, if you’d like to buy Mateus a drink.
• Toolbar: buttons in groups. File: Open, Save, Export PDF. Edit: Undo, Redo. View → Toolbar hides it. Plugins will add their own groups.
• Top panel: the Player tab, with rewind, play, play selection, pause and stop, count-in, loop, the metronome and the visual metronome, the speed, the level and the choice of output (Playing a score). They are greyed out while nothing can play the score, and the line at the bottom says why.
• Left panel, the score, right panel. The left panel holds the palette, every notation and effect tool of the editor as a button, in groups (voices and modes, bar, note, effects, notation); hover over one to see its name and key. Those that come with Guitar Pro 8’s notation (M5) are greyed out and say so. Click a group’s heading to fold it away or bring it back. The search field at its top (Ctrl + F) shows only the tools whose names hold the words you type (“slide”, “nat harm”); Escape empties it, Enter goes back to the score. The right panel holds the Inspector, with the caret’s bar, note and beat (Editing), and the Song tab, with the score’s information. The score sits on a dark background whatever the page colour, with its zoom slider in the corner (Zoom).
• Bottom panel: the Tracks tab, each track with its mixer, its notation buttons and an overview of the track across the song (Tracks and notation).
• Messages: one line at the very bottom with the latest error or warning: what went wrong opening a file, what is missing, a plugin that stopped working. It shows nothing else, so it stays quiet while everything works. Click it to see every message since OxiGuitar started; the chevron in its corner folds the list back.

Panels

Each panel has tabs. Click a tab’s name to show it; click the name of the tab that is already showing, or the chevron at the end of the tab strip, to fold the panel away to its strip, and again to bring it back. A folded side panel is a thin strip: click it to open it. Drag the edge between a panel and the score to resize it.

View → Panels hides or shows each panel altogether (F7 for the left one, F8 for the bottom one). Plugins can add tabs to any panel. They appear after OxiGuitar’s own tabs, with the plugin’s name for them, and look like the rest of the window: the plugin decides what is in them (buttons, tickboxes, sliders, lists, drawings), and OxiGuitar draws it in its own style and colours. A plugin’s tab may take a moment the first time it opens, while the plugin loads.