SceneAnchor 1.0.0

Scene folders that stay put. Existing scene-tree plugins keep their folders in a side file keyed by collection name, so copying or renaming a collection loses the lot. SceneAnchor writes the tree into the scene collection's own JSON, the same file as the scenes, so it survives copies, renames, exports, OBS Studio updates, and uninstalling the plugin.

Requirements
OBS Studio 32.0 or newer, 64-bit. Builds are provided for Windows x64, macOS (Universal) and Ubuntu x86_64.

Features

• Folder tree with unlimited nesting.
• Multi-select drag and drop for scenes and folders, with proper native undo/redo.
• Live search that filters the tree as you type: Enter transitions to the first switchable match, Esc clears. Bind a hotkey to the search box and the whole flow is keyboard-only.
• Colour labels on folders and scenes: 8 presets plus any custom colour. Before drawing, the label's lightness is nudged until it clears the WCAG 3:1 contrast floor against the tree's actual background, so a single stored value stays readable on light and dark themes alike.
• MRU strip of recently used scenes, one click to switch. How many fit is computed from the dock's width, so names stay readable instead of being chopped to stubs.
• Full right-click menu: transition, transition override, rename, duplicate, copy/paste filters, filters, screenshot, windowed/fullscreen projector, show in multiview, colour.
• Options in the empty-area right-click menu: double-click action, whether selecting a scene switches to it, MRU strip on/off, icons on/off.
• Usable down to about 120 logical pixels of dock width.
• 12 languages, following the OBS Studio language setting: English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), German, Japanese, Russian, French, Korean, Italian, Polish.
• Public API only. No private Qt slots, no findChild, no QMetaObject::invokeMethod on the main window, so it will not silently break on the next release.

Install

• Windows: unpack the .zip into your OBS Studio plugin directory.
• macOS: run the .pkg. It is not signed, so right-click it and choose Open, or allow it under System Settings > Privacy & Security.
• Linux: sudo apt install ./scene-anchor-1.0.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.deb

After installing, enable the dock. It is not visible by default, because OBS Studio does not automatically show new plugin docks. Open the Docks menu and tick SceneAnchor. If the dock does not appear after installing, this is almost always why; the plugin has not failed to load.

Known limitations

• Main canvas only. Scenes belonging to a secondary canvas, such as a vertical canvas created by another plugin, do not appear in this dock. OBS Studio 32 has no public API for setting a secondary canvas's current scene, and writing one into channel 0 would evict that plugin's transition and hard-cut the picture, so this is a deliberate omission rather than a missing feature. Those scenes are switched in that canvas's own dock.
• Deleting a scene that is nested inside another scene: undo restores the deleted scene and its child sources, but not its placement entry inside the parent scene that referenced it.
• Toggling "Show in multiview" does not refresh an already-open multiview projector until the tree next rebuilds.
• Drag and drop is disabled while a search filter is active, since the filter hides items and a drop position would no longer match what is shown. Clear the search box to re-enable it.
• Only Windows has been exercised on real hardware, against OBS Studio 32.0.2 and 32.2.2. The macOS and Linux targets compile and package in CI and the plugin contains no platform-specific code, but nobody has launched OBS Studio with it on either yet. Treat those two as untested rather than broken, and please report what you find.

The full list, with the reasoning behind each, is in the README.

Source, licence and bug reports
Source: https://github.com/rockbenben/scene-anchor, licensed GPL-2.0-or-later.
Bugs: https://github.com/rockbenben/scene-anchor/issues. Please include your OBS Studio version, platform and plugin version, plus the log from that session; every line this plugin writes is prefixed [scene-anchor]. If folders went missing, attach the exported scene collection, because the tree lives inside that file and it is the evidence.

AI disclosure
This plugin was developed by one person working with AI coding assistants (Claude Code), and this description was drafted the same way. All code was reviewed, built and manually tested by the author against OBS Studio 32.0.2 and 32.2.2 on Windows before release; the manual verification pass is checked into the repository as docs/pre-release-checklist.md.