Projects

A project is the desk kept as a file: what is open, how every layer is drawn, its styles and colours, the basemap, and where the map is looking. It is a small text file with the extension .hstd. Your data stays exactly where it is; nothing is copied into the project.

Saving

Project › Save project…, or Save on the toolbar, asks where to write the file. It saves the map's centre and zoom, the basemap and its opacity, which panel was open, every survey along with its visible layers, opacities and hover tips, every vector file with the visibility, opacity, hover tip and full style or theme of each of its layers, and every raster with its visibility and opacity. All of it in the order the tree was in. Paths are stored absolute, and also relative when a file sits beside or under the project. The relative one wins where it exists, so a project folder can move to another disk, or another computer, and take its data with it.

Opening

Project › Open project…, or Open on the toolbar. You can also double-click the .hstd file, since the Windows installer and the Linux packages register the type and macOS learns it from the app, or open it on the command line with homestead path/to/desk.hstd. Opening a project replaces the whole desk, closing everything that was open first. If the project names a file that is no longer there, you get told (The project opened without: …) and the rest opens anyway. A project written by a newer Homestead than the one you are running is refused, with a message saying so.

A survey backup, a plain .zip, opens from the command line the same way: homestead survey.zip. Double-clicking a project starts the app straight onto it.