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The menu bar, the Modeling window, the Layers panel, the Nodes window, and the command palette.
When Locus opens you get a blank document - no demo scene - split between the two workspaces. Here's what's on screen.
On the desktop app, Locus drives a real native menu bar - across the top of the screen on macOS, or across the top of the window on Windows. With the model window focused the menus run File | Edit | View | Draw | Construct | Combine | Transform | Select | Nodes | Help (plus the App menu on macOS). The bar is context-sensitive: it shows the Modeling menus when the model window is focused and the Nodes menus when the node window is.
Inside the model window there's also an icon menu bar - the same menus drawn as language-agnostic icons, so the tools read the same whatever language you work in. There are no names beside the icons: hover one and a tooltip gives its name and a one-line description.
Open a menu and its icons run down a column, seven at most, then wrap to a new column. So Combine is one short column and Draw is three.
Note
File lives on the Modeling side The File menu (new / open / save / export) belongs to the Modeling window - it owns the document. If you're using two windows, the node window has no File menu.
The construction canvas, usually on the left. You draw here with tools: pick a tool (from a toolbar, a menu, or the command palette), then click on the canvas to place points and build objects. The canvas has an optional grid and origin axes (toggled from the View menu). Scroll to zoom, drag the empty background to pan.
Alongside the canvas, the Layers panel lists everything in your construction, with hierarchy. From here you can select objects, group them, rename them, restyle them (stroke, fill, opacity), hide/show them, and - for objects defined by other objects - redefine their sources. Selection is two-way: selecting in the panel highlights on the canvas, and vice versa.
Every icon, chip, and style option is broken down on the full Layers panel page.
Tip
The canvas and the Layers panel are two views of the same construction. The circle c1 on the canvas is the highlighted c1 row in the panel, and the CENTER and RADIUS beneath it are the points A and B it was built from - select in one place and it lights up in the other.
The dataflow node graph, usually on the right. Nodes are boxes with input sockets on one side and output sockets on the other; you drag a wire from an output to an input to send data along it. The node graph evaluates live - change a value upstream and everything downstream recomputes.
Sockets and their wires are color-coded by data type - geometry, numbers, color - so you can read what each connection carries at a glance.
A searchable list of every command and node, each with a short description. It also learns your workflow, floating the commands you use most toward the top. Once you've learned a few commands and the palette has learned how you work, you can issue them almost instantly - just type a few letters and press Enter. And when you can't remember which menu something lives under, the palette is the fastest way in.
Pinned along the bottom of the Modeling viewport is a status bar with three zones:
- Left: the active command. When a tool or command is live, this fills with your theme accent and shows the command and its next-input prompt ("click a center", "click the second point"). Idle, it reads a muted Ready. It's the at-a-glance answer to "is a command running, and what does it want next?"
- Middle: messages. Transient notices - saved, exported, warnings - appear here and fade.
- Right: the version. The Locus Studio version you're running.
Ready to build something? Head to Your first pattern.
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