Interface Overview

Find your work from Home

Press Ctrl+K on Home to search files, projects, templates, and document contents. Open a file, go to a project, or create a new document from a template directly from its result. The Templates section shows the same available templates. Press Escape to close search and return to the control you were using.

Shell Layout

The Varve editor uses a CSS Grid layout called the Shell. From top to bottom, left to right, the zones are:

• Menubar — the top bar with File, Edit, View, Object, and other menus, alongside document renaming and dynamic context-aware shortcuts tailored to the current selection
• Context bar — the thin strip directly under the menubar that follows the selection: nothing selected shows quick tool pills, an image shows Crop / Remove BG / Vectorize, a shape shows fill, stroke, and stroke width, a text layer shows font controls, a frame shows orientation and clip, and a multi-selection shows group, align, and boolean actions
• Toolbar — the floating palette centred at the bottom of the canvas, holding the tools the active workspace declares (with flyout groups such as Shapes), a More tools control for anything that no longer fits, and Tool options for tools that have settings
• Design Canvas navigator — the surface list above Layers for creating, naming, and switching open-ended design canvases
• Design canvas — the central workspace where you create and edit your design, streamlined with hairline boundaries and direct-manipulation edge restore pills when panels are collapsed
• Layers Panel — the left-side panel showing artwork on the active canvas (Ctrl+B); resize it with the splitter and collapse it when you need more canvas space
• Inspector Panel — the right-side panel (Ctrl+Shift+B) for editing the selection, active tool, and document properties
• Selection strip and Status bar — two strips at the bottom of the editor: the first owns what is selected, the second owns instrumentation (cursor, renderer, document health, save state) and view controls (units, grid toggles, zoom, fit)

Choose Automatic, Tablet, orDesktop from Appearance settings or View > Workspace layout. Automatic uses the available viewport and pointer capabilities; it does not detect whether a detachable keyboard is connected. Tablet presentation keeps the Inspector available without blocking canvas input: a side rail in landscape and a shallow lower pane in portrait. Layers and Resources remain dismissible drawers, and primary tablet controls use 44 CSS-pixel targets. The same document, selection, tool, and history stay active as the workspace reflows.

Design canvases, frames, and publishing pages

Varve uses precise names for surfaces that behave differently. Adesign canvas is the open-ended editing view used for screens, exploration, components, and prototypes. A frameis an editable scene container inside that view; it has its own size, transform, clipping, auto layout, and direct export behavior.

A publishing page is an ordered output surface for print and page-layout work. It carries trim, bleed, numbering, spreads, master pages, and page-aware export. The Pages panel manages those publishing pages, while the Page Navigator is the compact switcher along the bottom of the editor.

If you are coming from Figma, its organizational “pages” are closest to Varve design canvases. Varve does not rename frames or turn them into publishing pages; switching workspaces changes which controls are disclosed while the same document and artwork remain intact.

In the Design workspace, use Design canvases above the Layers panel to create, rename, duplicate, reorder, and switch surfaces. The active canvas itself is not a layer; only its frames, groups, text, images, and other authored objects appear in Layers. For trim, spreads, master pages, numbering, and print output, switch to the Print workspace and use Publishing pages.

Menubar

The menubar provides access to all of Varve's operations through familiar dropdown menus:

• File — New document, Open, Save (Ctrl+S), Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S), Import (Ctrl+I), Export (Ctrl+E)
• Edit — Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z), Cut (Ctrl+X), Copy (Ctrl+C), Paste (Ctrl+V), Duplicate (Ctrl+D)
• View — Zoom controls, toggle snap, toggle pixel grid, toggle panels, canvas mode switching, and the Workspace submenu (every mode, Reset, Customize, Manage Layouts)
• Object — Group (Ctrl+G), Ungroup (Ctrl+Shift+G), Arrange (bring forward/send backward), Lock, boolean operations
• Tools — Quick access to all drawing and editing tools

Press Ctrl+Shift+; (Cmd+Shift+; on macOS) for Quick Actions. Search registered commands, use the arrow keys to choose a result, and press Enter to run it. Escapecloses the palette and returns to the editor.

Toolbar

The floating toolbar sits at the bottom centre of the canvas and contains the tools the active workspace declares. If the bottom edge is awkward on your setup — a laptop display edge or the macOS Dock can partially cover it — choose View > Toolbar at Top to move it to the top of the canvas; the choice is remembered per workspace, and Toolbar at Bottom restores the default. Each tool has a keyboard shortcut for quick switching:

• V — Select tool (move, resize, rotate)
• R — Rectangle tool
• O — Ellipse tool
• L — Line tool
• A — Arrow tool
• P — Pen tool (bezier paths)
• Shift+P — Pencil tool (freehand drawing)
• T — Text tool
• H — Hand tool (pan canvas)
• Z — Zoom tool

Keyboard access

The toolbar is a single tab stop. Press Tab to enter it, then move between tools with the arrow keys; Home andEnd jump to the first and last tool. A tooltip shows each tool's name and current shortcut, and shortcuts you remap are reflected in both.

Groups, flyouts, and overflow

Related tools are grouped by dividers — short, straight vertical rules, one per group boundary. A divider always marks a change of concern (shapes, then lines, then path tools, then selection, then measurement), so you can read the row by its groups rather than hunting for individual icons, and none of them opens a group of one. A tool with a chevron opens a flyout menu — Shapes holds rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and star.

When the window is too narrow for every tool, the palette keeps the tools you reach for most (creation first, then selection, editing, and navigation) and moves the rest behind the More toolscontrol at the end of the row, which names how many tools it holds. The More menu groups the hidden tools by category, so nothing becomes unreachable. Nothing that a workspace hides is ever deleted: the command palette lists it as Hidden from toolbar, andCustomize Workspace… puts it back.

In Draw, the palette carries a second row inside the same card for brush size, opacity, and the foreground/background colours — so the brush controls sit with the tools rather than in a separate floating bar.

See the full keyboard shortcuts reference and Vector Tools for detailed usage.

Canvas

The canvas is your primary workspace. It supports standard design tool interactions:

• Zoom — Mouse wheel to zoom in/out, anchored at cursor position. Ctrl+0 for 100%, Shift+1 to fit everything in view
• Pan — Hold Space and drag, or middle-click drag to pan the canvas
• View rotation — Available through View menu or status bar controls
• Grid overlay — Toggle pixel grid and layout grid overlays from View menu or status bar
• Snap — Scoped pointer assistance for visible edges, centers, guides, pages, frames, and configured grids. Toggle with , or the View menu; hold Ctrl/Cmd during a drag for a temporary bypass

The canvas uses a floating origin system that maintains numerical precision even at extreme zoom levels or when working with very large documents.

Precision placement

Use the Inspector for exact coordinates, configured nudges, explicit alignment references, and distinct spacing modes. The canvas uses the same document geometry for its snap guides and applied movement. See the Precision Placement guide for details.

Layers Panel

The Layers panel displays your document as a hierarchical tree of nodes. On a tablet it opens as a dismissible drawer. Key features:

• Tree view — Expandable/collapsible hierarchy showing parent-child relationships
• Multi-select — Ctrl+click for disjoint selection, Shift+click for range selection, or enable the touch multi-select control before marquee selection
• Drag and drop — Reorder and reparent nodes by dragging between tree entries; use layer context and Arrange menus for tap-accessible order commands
• Filter/search — Type-ahead filtering to quickly find layers by name
• Inline rename — Double-click or press F2 to rename any layer
• Batch Rename — Right-click a layer and choose Batch Rename… to find and replace across the selection or every layer, with a live preview before anything changes
• Context menu — Right-click for group, duplicate, delete, arrange, and copy/paste operations
• Visibility and lock toggles — Eye icon to hide/show, lock icon to prevent editing

Open Layer navigation settings in the Layers header to choose what an unmodified row activation does to the canvas: Select only,Reveal when needed, Center selection, orFit selection. Focus-only keyboard movement and Shift/Ctrl multi-select keep the current camera. The separate Reveal canvas selection in Layers panel option controls the reverse direction and does not control canvas movement. Right-click a selection for one-shot Reveal on Canvas,Center Selection, or Zoom to Selection commands.

Inspector Panel

The inspector panel (right sidebar) is a contextual workspace for the current selection. The Design tab is the everyday Properties surface, organized around one canonical owner for each property group.

With nothing selected, the Design tab follows the active tool. The Frametool lists searchable size presets (devices first, with favorites and recents); picking one places a frame of that size and selects it. Tools with settings of their own, such as the brushes, marquees, magic wand, text, and crop, show a Show … optionsbutton that opens their Tool options beside the toolbar. Every other tool keeps the canvas and document settings in view, and the Page tool adds the page's print geometry at the top. A selected frame (or multi-frame selection) embeds a searchable Resize to Preset dropdown and orientation swap toggle directly inside Position & Size, featuring instant search by name or dimension, category filter chips (Phone, Desktop, Social, Print, Custom, Favorites), multi-frame batch resizing, and Save current size as preset.

• Position & Size — X, Y, W, H, rotation, bounds, and aspect-ratio editing with mixed-selection support
• Design — Stack / Grid, Appearance, fills, stroke, effects, and selection-aware content controls
• Adjustments — Image and object treatment workflows when the selection supports them
• Prototype — Interaction authoring for supported design and motion workflows
• Export — Quick single-object export (format, scale, download/export), saved per-node export configurations, and generated code (SVG, CSS, Tailwind, CSS Modules, Flutter, SwiftUI)

Tabs and sections are contextual. Each property is edited in one canonical section, so empty and mixed-selection states can communicate unavailable and mixed values directly. Specialized sections appear only when their owning node or workflow supports them:

• Canvas & Snapping — When nothing is selected, configure canvas background color, color mode, soft proofing, document/isometric grids, and global magnetic pointer snapping with customizable tolerance.
• Mockups — For mockup frames, select templates, bind and replace artwork surfaces, tune placement (fit, alignment, rotation), and snapshot or flatten instances.
• Masks — Add and tune vector masks, raster masks, and clipping masks with live density, feathering, inversion, and fill-rule controls.
• Prototype Interactions — Configure triggers (click, hover, key press, delay), target screens, overlays, and smart animate transitions.
• Section Customization — Open the Section Manager to hide, expand, or reorder inspector sections to suit your workflow, with preferences persisted per workspace.

In Design, Position & Size owns geometry and bounds whileStack / Grid owns the relationship between children (with collapsible Layout Guides for columns and rows). Fixed bounds remain visible but inactive; Relative fields show their authored percentage and reference. Fills, strokes, effects, typography, images, components, tables, and export each have one owner. Effect details open in a focused editor beside the rail while row actions stay available from an overflow menu. See the Auto Layout guide for the sizing explanations and examples.

Align & Distribute

The Align bar adapts to what the selection can actually do. The reference control always shows all three targets — Selection, Frame, andPage — with the active one highlighted; options that do not apply to the current selection stay visible but dimmed, and hovering explains why (for example, aligning to the selection bounds needs two or more layers). Every align button names its live target in its tooltip and accessible name ("Align left edges to parent frame"), so the commands never silently change meaning when the selection changes. With one layer selected the reference resolves to the nearest frame or the page; relative-only clusters — distribute, fixed gap, key object, tidy up, and oriented bounding boxes — appear once two or more layers are selected, and every one of those commands also stays reachable from the Object menu and its keyboard shortcut.

Position & Size

The Position & Size section provides precise, balanced geometric editing. Coordinates and dimensions (X, Y, W, H, R) use clean, single-letter display labels with tabular numbers while preserving full screen-reader descriptions (such as X (px) and W (px)) and accessible spinbutton contracts.

W and H feature a centered proportion lock built from the standard linked/unlinked chain pair, guaranteeing the locked state is unmistakable at a glance. For frames, a responsive orientation swap button allows one-click toggling between portrait and landscape dimensions. The rotation row features a dedicated R angle field alongside a compact, segmented pill grouping housing horizontal flip, vertical flip, and progressively-disclosed skew controls—eliminating unsightly voids or misaligned icon scattering.

Scrollbar Gutter Stability: The inspector panel reserves an intentional, stable gutter (scrollbar-gutter: stable) paired with a slim, themed scrollbar track. Controls never overlap, shift, or become obscured when vertical scrolling activates, maintaining rock-solid right alignment across all rail widths.

Corner Radius

A single Radius field handles uniform rounding with an inline icon button to switch to per-corner mode. Independent corners render as a true 2x2 grid— top-left and top-right above bottom-left and bottom-right, each beside its corner icon — so the fields map onto the shape instead of reading as a row of dials. Fields carry their px unit, and screen readers hear the full corner names. If a shape already has different radii per corner, the grid opens automatically. A Smoothing slider appears once any rounding exists, and corner radius works in multi-selection when any selected node is a rectangle or frame.

Image Placement & Cropping

The five fit modes (Fill, Fit, Crop, Stretch, Tile) sit in one equal-width track. Scale and offset follow the fit mode: they are hidden for Stretch, which pins the image to the shape, with a one-line explanation, and reappear for every other mode. Selecting multiple images batches every change, and mixed fit or scale values surface asMixed rather than silently adopting the first image. The Crop & Bounds section keeps a six-up aspect ratio strip (Free, 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 3:2, 9:16) plus collapsed Trim to Subject, Protect Faces, and Expand Bounds subsections.

Masks

When an eligible layer has no mask, one compact action group offers the applicable creations — Clip, Alpha, and Luminance for containers, Vector mask for leaves, and a Brush mask action — each with an icon and a tooltip that explains what the matte uses. With a mask active, the card presents a labelled Type row andSource picker, switches for Hide source andLink transform, Feather and Density fields, a segmented fill rule, and a vector-path edit trigger. Mask visibility and inversion are 24px icon toggles and removal is a danger-styled trash button; a collapsed Mask section still shows the active mask type beside its header so an enabled mask is never invisible.

Fill & Stroke

A paint row states its own value: the swatch carries a readout — #4A90E2 for solids, the paint type otherwise, and Mixed when the selected layers disagree — so checking a fill no longer requires opening a picker. The compact type button beside the swatch switches Solid, Gradient, Image, and Pattern from one menu while keeping the current paint's data. Blend mode is one click inside the swatch's own colour popover — no trip through the row menu — and a compact chip on the row names the mode whenever it differs from Normal or several fills stack. Stacked fills get direct reorder and remove controls; opacity and the per-fill blend chip sit on the row's second line whenever a stack or mixed selection needs the horizontal room, keeping the value legible. Fills are gated to layers whose renderer actually paints them — group layers and line primitives hide the section rather than offering controls that cannot change the canvas. The colour popover is shared by fills, strokes, and gradient stops, and a linear or angular gradient exposes its numeric rotation inline as a scrubbable field.

Strokes follow the same grammar. The collapsed Advanced row summarises every non-default setting — "Dashed · Square caps · Arrowheads" — so a customised stroke is never mistaken for a plain one. Inside, dash style is a preset list (Solid, Dashed, Dotted, Dash-dot) with the exact pattern field under Custom; the miter limit appears only for miter joins and dash phase only while dashed; both arrowheads share one row for lines and open paths; and per-side widths are a switch with Use one width to return to a uniform outline. A zero-width stroke is flagged as invisible, new strokes copy the layer's previous stroke style, and stacked strokes can be reordered or removed directly.

Selection Colors

Selection Colors summarizes every colour in the selection — fills, strokes, gradient stops, table paints, and text ranges — with a swatch, monospace hex value, its role, a use count when a colour is shared, a copy-value button, and aselect matching layers crosshair that targets every layer using that colour. To avoid duplicating the Fill section, it stays hidden when a single object's only colour is already editable one row below, and appears whenever a selection holds two or more colours or layers.

Typography

The Typography section keeps the everyday controls in one scannable spine: content, font family, weight, style, size, line height, letter spacing, and alignment. Alignment uses the standard icon set with named labels and tooltips instead of single letters, and case uses self-describing labels (None, ABC, abc, Abc). Tracking, paragraph spacing, vertical alignment, direction, writing mode, case, decoration, list style, overflow, and text sizing live in a collapsed Advanced typography subsection whose header badge reports how many of those properties the current layer already uses. Vertical alignment appears only for text with a container (area text), and vertical orientation appears only when the writing mode is vertical. OpenType features list only the tags the selected face reports — required shaping features are never offered as disabled rows — use the inspector's shared labelled dropdowns, and show a count of active features while collapsed. Glyph adjustments are a collapsed subsection with a count badge, and the whole section remains hideable from the Section Manager.

Insights

Insights is the document-level review surface, collapsed by default at the end of the Design tab and hideable from the Section Manager like any optional section. Tabs use plain names — Review, Contrast, Spacing, Names, Governance, Design debt, Prototype, Auto layout, Components, Similar layers, and Linter — and are filtered by applicability: Spacing needs two or more layers, Names needs a selection, Auto layout needs a frame, and Prototype needs prototype data, so a tab never opens onto a dead end. Tabs a workspace treats as secondary (Spacing and Names in Design) stay reachable from the More menu. Similar layers stays available with nothing selected because its empty state is a working natural-language search field. The Review tab filters findings by category and severity, reports how many findings were suppressed this session with a Restore action, and only shows actions that actually change the document.

Selection Strip and Status Bar

The bottom of the editor is two strips stacked on one another. Each fact lives in exactly one of them, so nothing is reported twice:

• Selection strip — the selected node's name, type, size, position, and ancestor breadcrumbs (the breadcrumbs are clickable). With nothing selected it shows the active page and the document's layer count.
• Status bar — instrumentation on the left, controls on the right.

The status bar carries:

• Renderer status, page / colour mode / image size, and the live cursor position
• Document health — a single count for audit findings, design debt, and layout score, which opens the Audit tab
• Save status (always shown) and shortcut tips
• Units: px, pt, cm, mm, in, or %
• View toggles: pixel grid, snapping, grid spacing, ruler origin, baseline grid, and clear guides
• Zoom percentage with step buttons, plus Fit page, Fit all, and Fit selection (Fit selection appears only while something is selected)
• View rotation — the current angle and its reset, in one control
• On-device AI processing — shown only while a job is actually running

Every one of these is a section in Customize Workspace (View menu or command palette), so each workspace can show a different row and arrange it differently. Reordering moves a section within its own half of the bar; save status stays on.

Canvas Modes

Varve supports three canvas display modes, accessible from the View menu:

• Full — All fills, effects, and overlays rendered (default)
• Outline — Fills and effects stripped, uniform stroke-only display for focusing on structure
• Preview — All overlays hidden for a clean preview of the final design

Workspace Modes

The menubar carries the six task-focused workspacesas a switcher: Design, Print, Draw, Photo, Motion, and Email. The active workspace is always named in its accent pill; the others are icons, and any mode that no longer fits moves into the switcher's overflow menu rather than disappearing. Each workspace curates the toolbar and workflow for its task, and every mode edits the same document with the same selection, viewport, and undo history — switch workspaces withCtrl+Shift+1 through Ctrl+Shift+6 in the switcher's order; hovering a mode names it with its shortcut, the overflow menu lists each remaining mode with its full shortcut label, and the active workspace keeps its name at every width where the strip has room for it (below that the pill compacts to its icon and the name stays in the tooltip). The next keys are actions:Logo Tools uses Ctrl+Shift+7 to open Design and reveal its panel. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L also toggles Logo Tools from any workspace (Command+Option+Shift+L on macOS), while the shared Code panel uses Ctrl+Shift+8 in the current workspace, and the existingCtrl+Shift+J shortcut toggles that same panel in the desktop app. Browsers may reserve it for Developer Tools, so use Ctrl+Shift+8 or View > Panels > Code Panel in the browser. On macOS, use Command+Shift with the same numbers and Command+Shift+J for the desktop Code toggle; Chrome uses that chord for Downloads, so use Command+Shift+8 or the View menu for Code in the browser. Thekeyboard shortcut reference keeps workspace order and panel toggle alternatives in one place.

The toolbar itself is composed per workspace: tools, their order, and flyout groups all come from the workspace's configuration, so the same horizontal palette leads with the tools each task actually needs. See theWorkspaces guide for the full mode table.