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Saving, Exporting & Files

Saving & opening

Create, open, save, and merge Locus designs from the File menu.

All file commands live in the File menu on the Modeling side of the window. From there you start new designs, reopen old ones, save your work, and pull another design into the one you're editing.

The basics

• New (⌘N): start a fresh, empty design. A new design always opens the same way: the view is framed on the origin with the X axis running -100 to 100 mm across the canvas, whatever size the window is, and the sticky swatch is reset to Graphite 4H (see Style palettes), so the first thing you draw is a light pencil line. Launching Locus with nothing loaded frames the same view; opening a file fits the view to that file's contents instead.
• Open (⌘O): load an existing .locus design.
• Save (⌘S): write your current design back to its file in place.
• Save As (⇧⌘S): write a copy under a new name, leaving the original untouched.

In the desktop app these open the standard native file panels - Finder on macOS, File Explorer on Windows - so saving and opening feel like any other program: you pick the folder and name yourself, anywhere on your disk.

Unsaved-changes guard

Locus never lets New, Open, closing a window, or quitting (⌘Q) throw away unsaved work silently - each one stops and asks first if the current design has unsaved changes:

• New offers the full Save / Discard / Cancel choice: Save writes your work first, Discard clears the design without saving, and Cancel backs out and leaves everything as it was.
• Open asks a simpler yes/no: proceed and discard the unsaved changes, or cancel and stay on the current design - since you're about to load a different file over them.
• Closing a window or quitting the app also runs the full Save / Discard / Cancel prompt described above.

In the detached Nodes window (which has no file of its own to save), New falls back to a plain discard confirmation - the full Save option lives on the Modeling/main window, which owns the document.

File operations don't clutter the undo stack

Starting a new design or opening one resets the undo history rather than adding to it - so Undo after an Open or New never partially reverts into the previous design. Each file you open starts with a clean slate in both the Modeling and Nodes undo histories.

Auto-save & recovery

Locus keeps a background safety net for the times something goes wrong. Every so often it writes a recovery snapshot of your current work off to the side. This snapshot does not touch your real .locus file - it's a separate backup, taken quietly while you work, so your saved file only ever changes when you save it.

How often the snapshot is taken is set by the auto-save interval preference in Settings, 120 seconds by default. See Preferences. Auto-save is a licensed feature - it runs when your copy of Locus is licensed.

If the app ever quits unexpectedly or crashes, the next launch prompts you to restore the recovered work, so a power cut or a hung session doesn't cost you the last few minutes.

Important

Recovery is a safety net, not a substitute for saving. The snapshot only helps after a crash, and only when the feature is licensed and running - keep saving your work with ⌘S as you go.

Open Recent

The File menu keeps a Open Recent list of the designs you've opened lately, most recent first. It's the quickest way back into whatever you were working on, and it finds those files wherever they were saved.

Append - merging another design in

File > Append... brings the contents of another saved .locus design into the document you already have open, instead of replacing it. The incoming design arrives wrapped in its own group, named after the file, so it stays tidy and easy to move or delete as a unit.

A few things worth knowing:

• Hand-drawn, point-based geometry comes in live and editable: you can keep adjusting it.
• Node-generated geometry comes in frozen at its current shape: the other design's node graph is not imported, only the resulting geometry (the same way importing an SVG brings in outlines, not a recipe).
• If any incoming names clash with objects you already have, the whole appended design gets a single number suffix so nothing collides: your existing work is never renamed or disturbed.

Appending is one undo step, and the new group is selected when it lands, so you can immediately reposition it.

Tip

Append is the way to build a composite from parts - pull in a motif you saved earlier and arrange it alongside your current construction. It's the .locus counterpart to importing SVG artwork.

In the browser dev version

If you're running Locus in a browser rather than the desktop app, there are no native file panels. Instead the app saves into a local project folder and lists your saved designs by name in the File menu, where Save, New, and Open work from that list. Append works the same way, with its own list beside Open.

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Related

• The .locus file
• Importing artwork