Menus & files

Five menus sit at the top of the window. The first three act on the document — File, Design and Edit — View switches what you are looking at, and Help touches neither. Every item that has a shortcut prints it on its own row, so the menu is where you learn the keys. Shortcuts are inactive while you are typing in a text field.

File

New (Ctrl+N) replaces the open document with a fresh one: the default soft-lithography substrate — a patterned slab with a cap bonded over it — and one empty component named Chip, already the root. It is the smallest design that resolves, so you start on a blank canvas rather than on an error.

Open… (Ctrl+O) and Save (Ctrl+S) / Save As… (Ctrl+Shift+S) use your system’s own file dialogs, filtered to Experiware designs with an all-files escape hatch. Save on a document that has never been saved asks for a path first. Save As starts in the current file’s folder, offering the document’s name.

Export Fabrication Files… opens the export dialog, which is where the files a process would publish are listed and written. It is always enabled: a stack whose process publishes nothing is explained inside the dialog rather than by a grayed row that cannot say why.

Design

Fab processes… and Stack… open the two fabrication editors — the same windows the toolbar’s process chip and the Layers zone’s edit button open. See Fab processes window and Stack window.

Edit

Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Y, or Ctrl+Shift+Z) each name what they would act on: Undo Draw Channel, Redo Set Depth. With nothing on the stack the row reads a bare Undo and grays out.

One gesture is one step. A channel drawn through four bends, the points it created at its ends, and the drag that positioned a freshly placed component all undo as the single act you performed. Selecting is not an edit and has no step of its own.

While the cursor is in a text field, Ctrl+Z undoes your typing in that field instead.

View

2D top-down and 3D orbit pick the view, the one you are in marked. Tab prints on the row you are not on: the key toggles, so it always takes you to the other one. The toolbar’s 2D/3D pair is the same switch. See Viewport & navigation.

Help

User Guide (F1) opens this guide in your browser. It is the copy that ships beside the application, so it works with no network. A copy whose guide folder is missing says so on the status bar rather than opening nothing.

Check for Updates… asks now instead of waiting for the next launch, and answers either way: a newer release raises the update banner, and anything else — you are on the latest, or the server could not be reached — lands as a note on the status bar. It runs even with the startup check switched off, since asking outright overrides your own default. What the check sends, and where that switch is, are Settings → Updates.

About Experiware names the build you are running, where to write, and the folder crash reports land in. The version and the report are what a fault is triaged from — one that cannot be attributed to a release is hard to act on.

Every row here is always enabled. A failure that can say what went wrong is worth more than a gray row that cannot.

The window title

The title bar reads Chip — Experiware: the document’s name first, since that is the part the taskbar leaves visible. A leading • means there are unsaved changes.

The marker follows the edits rather than a flag — undo back to the point you last saved and the title reads clean again, redo away from it and the dot returns.

Unsaved changes

New, Open and closing the window all discard the open document, so each asks first when there is something to lose. The question names the document and offers three answers: Save saves and then continues, Discard throws the changes away and continues, and Cancel abandons the command. Dismissing the dialog with Esc or a click outside it counts as Cancel.

Save only continues if the save lands. Dismiss the path picker, or hit a failed write, and the command is abandoned instead — the changes you asked to keep are still there.

Design files

Designs are .exw files, and one format covers both roles: a design and a component library are the same kind of file, so a file you author can be placed by another design without converting anything.

When you open a design, Experiware also scans the folder it came from and loads every sibling .exw that declares a library identity — that is how those components reach the Libraries tab. A sibling that cannot be loaded, or one that changed since your design pinned it, is reported as a library warning on the status bar; your design still opens. A failure inside a library your design actually uses is fatal, and the open is refused.

A failed open or save raises the file-error report: the headline, the path, and the message from the file itself, which for a malformed design names the line and column. The document you had open is untouched, so a mistyped path costs nothing.

A design that loads but does not resolve is a different case and is not a failure: it opens, and the reason appears in red under the inspector’s header, where you fix it.

Crash reports

If Experiware ever dies unexpectedly it writes a report before it goes: which build you were running, your platform, what failed and where. Reports land in crashes under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Experiware — the folder the About box states — and accumulate rather than overwriting each other, since two crashes in a row are often the tell.

The design you had open is not saved along with it. A crash costs you whatever the title bar’s • was covering.

Experiware Guide