menus

Home > Menu reference

< Previous: Keyboard shortcuts | Next: Data-type reference >

Reference

Menu reference

A guide to the native menu bar, which changes depending on whether the Modeling or Nodes window is focused.

Locus uses a standard native menu bar - at the top of the screen on macOS, or across the top of the window on Windows - and it's context-sensitive: the menus follow whichever window you have focused. Click into the Modeling window and you get the modeling menus; click into the Nodes window and the bar switches to the node menus.

Modeling menus

When the Modeling window is focused, the menu bar reads:

App | File | Edit | View | Draw | Construct | Combine | Transform | Select | Window

A few things worth knowing:

• File lives only on the Modeling side. Saving, opening, and exporting all happen from here: the Nodes window has no File menu.
• The App menu (the "Locus Studio" menu) holds Settings... and, just below it, Themes...: the accent-color picker. See Preferences and Themes.
• Open Recent under File lets you jump back into designs you've worked on lately.
• Draw, Construct, and Combine hold the drawing and geometry tools (points, lines, circles, arcs, rectangles; perpendiculars, midpoints, intersections; regions, fills, and booleans). Draw also holds the compass & straightedge construction tools.
• Select gathers the selection commands: Select All, Deselect, Inverse, and the "Same" submenu for picking everything that shares a type, color, source, or radius.

Nodes menus

When the Nodes window is focused, the bar is shorter. It leads with its own View menu - five commands, not the modeling window's longer one - followed by eight Add menus that group the available nodes by category - the palette of building blocks you drop into the node graph. Each Add menu gathers a related family of nodes, so you can browse by what a node does rather than hunting through one long list.

Because there's no File menu on this side, saving and exporting stay with the Modeling window even while you're building a node graph - just click back into Modeling when you need them.

Undo and Redo

The Edit menu on both windows shows Undo and Redo, and each item names the exact step it will affect - for example Undo Group, Undo Move, or Redo Add Node. The name updates as you work, so you always know what's about to be undone before you commit.

Because the two windows keep separate histories, the Edit menu reflects whichever window is focused. Undo something on the canvas and it undoes canvas work; undo in the node graph and it undoes node graph work - the two never cross.

A menu item greys out when there's nothing left to undo or redo on that side, so an unavailable command is a signal, not a bug.

Note

Since the menu bar follows the focused window, the same keyboard shortcut can do different things depending on where you're working. When in doubt, glance up at the menu bar to confirm which window is active.

Tip

The keyboard shortcuts shown next to each menu command are the current, authoritative ones for your version - a handy way to learn or double-check a shortcut.

Help menu

Every window carries a Help menu, always the rightmost one. Help > Open (or F1, or ⌘? - ⌘⇧/ - the macOS-standard Help key) opens the built-in offline docs viewer - a searchable copy of this wiki, right inside the app, so you can look something up without a browser or a connection. Links that point outside the docs open in your system browser or mail client. You can also right-click any tool button to jump straight to that tool's help page.

Per-menu reference

Each Modeling menu has its own page listing every command with its icon and a link into the guide that covers it:

File | Edit | View | Draw | Construct | Combine | Transform | Select | Nodes

The Nodes window has one menu page of its own, for the View menu it carries instead of the modeling one:

View (Nodes)

< Previous: Keyboard shortcuts | Next: Data-type reference >