Saving, Sharing & Collaboration

LoomFlow is account-based, but the editor runs fully offline. You sign in once to activate the app, then design on your own machine with no connection required — your work saves to a single portable .loomflow file on your disk. Collaboration scales from simply handing that file to someone, up to cloud sync across your own machines, up to shared team workspaces where harnesses are checked out for editing.

Save and open

Action	Hotkey	Where
Save	`Ctrl+S`	`☰` file menu → `Save`
Save to a new file	`Ctrl+Shift+S`	`☰` file menu → `Save As…`
Open	`Ctrl+O`	`☰` file menu → `Open…`
New document	—	`☰` file menu → `New`

The first save prompts for a location with a suggested name derived from the harness name (for example main-loom.loomflow). Every save after that writes silently to the same file.

Behavior differs slightly by platform:

Desktop app: native open/save dialogs with real filesystem paths. Re-saves are always silent, in place.
Browser (Chromium): uses the File System Access API — after you pick a file once, Ctrl+S re-saves to it silently, just like desktop.
Browser (Firefox/Safari): no File System Access API, so Open… uses a file picker upload and every Ctrl+S downloads a fresh copy. It works, but the desktop app or a Chromium browser is the better fit.

One portable file

A .loomflow is a single, self-contained project file: the whole document and its device images are packed into one encrypted container. There is no sidecar folder to carry around and nothing to hand-edit — copy the one file and the design travels complete. It always opens in LoomFlow on any machine where you’re signed in, so the simplest form of sharing is just sending the file.

With cloud sync on, your projects live in your LoomFlow account and are available from any machine you sign into — design at your desk, review from a laptop, without passing files around by hand. Share links hand someone a read-only view of a design without giving them the file. Edits you make offline sync up the next time you reconnect.

Team workspaces and check-out

Team plans add a shared workspace: a common set of harnesses everyone on the team can see. To keep two people from overwriting each other, shared editing uses check-out — you check a harness out to work on it, which locks it so a teammate can’t save over your changes, then check it back in when you’re done. Everyone can see who currently holds a file, so there’s no guessing and no clobbered work.

Working offline

The editor never needs a live connection. Your signed-in session carries an offline grace window, so you can keep designing on a plane or a shop floor and let cloud sync catch up when you’re back online. If a subscription lapses entirely, the app drops to Free limits — but every .loomflow you’ve saved keeps opening.

Unsaved-changes protection

The title bar and the ☰ button show the current file name; a dot appears next to it when there are unsaved changes (hover shows Unsaved changes). The check compares the document against what was last saved — so undoing back to exactly the saved state clears the indicator.

Desktop: closing the window with unsaved changes shows a native confirmation (Discard unsaved changes and quit?). Cancel keeps the app open.
Browser: the standard leave-page warning appears when the tab closes with unsaved changes.
New and Open… also ask (Discard unsaved changes?) before replacing a dirty document.

Undo and redo

Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+Y (or Ctrl+Shift+Z) redoes — up to 200 steps. The toolbar ↶ / ↷ buttons do the same. Only document changes are undoable; selection, view mode, and panning are not, and bulk operations (paste, KiCad import, auto-arrange) land as a single undo step. Undo history is in-memory only — it resets when you open another file or start a New document, so save early and often.

Opening older files

Every document carries a schemaVersion (currently 3). On open, the loader runs a migration chain from the file’s version up to the current one, so files saved by older versions of the tool keep opening — for example, v1 files gain the notes collection and v2 files gain devices. Unknown fields are preserved rather than dropped. If a file’s version is newer than the app understands, opening fails with a message telling you to update the app instead of mangling the file. Early .harness.json files convert to .loomflow automatically the first time you save them.

For getting designs in and out of other tools, see Importing and Exporting. The full hotkey list is at Hotkeys reference.