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 changes nothing in the document. Every item that has a shortcut prints it on its own row. Shortcuts are inactive while you are typing in a text field.

File

New (Ctrl+N) replaces the open document with a fresh one: one empty component named Chip, already the root, over a single patterned slab. The slab is a stack named substrate, formed by a process named soft-lithography. Both names are yours to change, in the Stack window and the Fab processes window.

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 option. 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. The item never grays out: a stack whose process publishes nothing is explained inside the dialog.

Design

Fab processes… and Stack… open the two fabrication editors — the same windows the toolbar’s Fab processes button and the Layers section’s pencil 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 to undo 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, with 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. If you are on the latest, or the server could not be reached, the answer is a note on the status bar. It runs even with the startup check switched off. 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 are written to. Quote the version when you report a fault.

The window title

The title bar reads Chip — Experiware: the document’s name first. A leading • means there are unsaved changes.

The marker follows the edits themselves: undo back to the point you last saved and the dot clears, redo away from it and it 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 succeeds. Dismiss the path picker, or hit a failed write, and the command is abandoned instead, with the changes you asked to keep 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.

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 crashes it writes a report first: which build you were running, your platform, what failed and where. Reports are written to crashes under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Experiware — the folder the About box states — and accumulate instead of overwriting each other.

The design you had open is not saved along with it, so a crash costs you the unsaved changes the title bar’s • marked.

Experiware Guide