User Guide¶

This guide walks through RustGIS by task. Each page covers one part of the app:

The window¶

• Ribbon: tabs of commands grouped by task. The Project button opens the backstage (Start, New, Open, Save, Save As and About).
• Quick Access Toolbar (top left): New, Open, Save, Undo and Redo, plus any commands you add under Settings › Customize › Quick Access.
• Layers pane (left): the map's layers in drawing order, with their legends. Tick a layer to show or hide it; drag it up or down to change the drawing order; right-click it to zoom to it, rename or remove it and more. The entire layer block, including its expanded legend and classes, is split 50/50: drop in its upper half to insert above, or its lower half to insert below. The insertion line shows the destination. Drop inside the first block's upper half to move to the top, or inside the final block's lower half to move to the bottom. Type in the box at the top to show only the layers and tables whose names contain the text (Esc clears it); a selected layer it hides is no longer selected, and layers can be reordered again once it is cleared. The buttons beside the list's title list the layers by drawing order, by data source (grouped under the file, web address or database each comes from) or by selection (selectable layers first, each with a box to make it selectable or not and its count of selected features); only the drawing order reorders layers. A layer that isn't selectable is skipped by the Select tool's clicks and boxes on the map; Select By Attributes, Select Layer By Location and the attribute table still select in it, since they name the layer. Pick several layers with Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click to add or drop one, or Shift and click to take the rows from the last one clicked; the layer clicked last, outlined, is the one the Style and Data tabs act on. Right-click one of them to zoom to them all, show or hide them, allow or block selecting their features on the map, move them to the top or bottom of the drawing order (one in a group, to the top or bottom of its group), put them in a group or take them out of one, or remove them; a layer the filter hides is left out. A new group made from the menu asks for its name. In scripts, layer.select takes a list and a mode (replace, toggle or extend), and the commands that remove, show, move, group or zoom to a layer take a list in layer, or the picked layers when it is left out. Group layers to keep related ones together, such as one dataset drawn as several layers with their own visibility ranges: right-click a layer and pick Group › New Group, or move it into a group that already exists. A group folds open and closed with its arrow; its box shows or hides all its layers at once (each keeps its own box), and its menu renames it, sets a transparency over its layers' own, ungroups it (its layers stay) or removes it with its layers. Drag a layer onto a group's row, or between its layers, to put it in the group; drag it out of the group's rows to take it out. Drag the group's row to move all its layers in the drawing order. Scripts and the AI Assistant build groups with group.add, group.set, group.scaleRange (a visibility range on top of each layer's own), group.move, group.expand, group.ungroup, group.remove and layer.group. Copy Layer (or Copy Group, with its layers) from its menu and Paste Layer (or Paste Group) it on a layer (above it), a group or the map's name above the list (at the top, also when the map has no layers yet), after switching to another map if you like, or on a map in the Browser (at the top). The copy keeps its source, symbology, labels, transparency, scale range, definition query, display filters and mask, but not its selection, and a name the map already has gets " copy". Pasting into the same map duplicates the layer. A mask whose layer the map lacks is cleared, and said. Groups don't nest: pasted into a group (on it, or on one of its layers), a copied group's layers join it at the top. Scripts use layer.copy and layer.paste. The Style and Data tabs act on the layer selected here. The tabs at the top of the left pane switch it between Layers, Browser and Data Sources (also in View › Windows). The planet button above the list switches the map between the Earth and other celestial bodies.
• Map view: one tab per map and layout. The buttons at the top right zoom in, zoom out and go to the full extent; the north arrow and scale bar sit in the corners (on a rotated or tilted map, click the north arrow to face north and look straight down); tile credits at the bottom right.
• Panes (right): Tools (geoprocessing), Symbology, Labeling, History, Details, Bookmarks, Editing, Workflows, Script, SQL, the AI Assistant and more. Open them from View › Windows or the commands that use them. Each pane opened gets a tab at the top, in the order opened: click a tab to show its pane, and its ✕ to close it (the next tab shows; closing the last hides the side). Right-click a tab to close it, the others or all; the ✕ at the header's end closes every pane. Tabs that don't fit are listed under ». A ribbon button for a pane shows it when it is open but not in view, and closes it when it is. Pane Sets keep the tabs open.
• Status bar: the scale (type one, or pick from the list), the zoom level, bearing and pitch (click them to face north and look straight down again), the pointer's coordinates (click them to switch between decimal degrees and DMS), the coordinate system (click it to change the projection), the selection count (with a button to clear it), the latest notice, the last draw time, the frame rate and a GPU/CPU renderer switch. While agents control the desktop app, it also shows the MCP relay or file bridge.

Command Search (Ctrl+K, or the box at the top right) finds commands and geoprocessing tools by name. Commands with an interactive entry point open their dialog, file picker or pane to collect input: for example, Basemap, Add Tile Layer, Rename, Select By Attributes and exports. Workflow tools such as Georeference and Classification Wizard open in the Workflows pane. Workflows can also be found by their translated titles or section ids, such as deepLearning. A command that needs input but has no interactive entry point stays listed greyed out, with the reason on hover, instead of running without its required parameters. Desktop-only database connections are also disabled in the browser.

To give the map more room, collapse the ribbon to its tab row with the chevron at its right end, by double-clicking a tab, or with Ctrl+F1 (Cmd+F1 on macOS, where F1 may need the Fn key). Click a tab to peek at its commands while collapsed. When the window is narrower than the ribbon, arrows at its ends scroll it.

The ribbon¶

The tabs stay the same whatever is selected: Style and Data act on the layer selected in Layers.

Menus with checkboxes stay open while you change options: stack or show web basemaps, combine Visual and Camera Effects, or customize Ribbon tabs and Quick Access buttons. Click outside the menu to dismiss it. The time slider's Layers menu likewise stays open while binding layers.

Projects¶

A project (.rgis) holds maps, layouts, reports, presentations, notebooks, styles, tasks and models. Vector data loaded whole is stored inside the project. On the desktop, linked local files (large vector files read in place, rasters and tile archives) are saved relative to the project's folder: moving the folder whole keeps the links. Save As recomputes those paths for the new location. Files on another drive or a network share stay absolute. Web addresses, databases and embedded data are unchanged; files uploaded in the web app are embedded. A project opened as text, as in the web app, has no folder against which to resolve local links. Saved web addresses drop passwords, keys and tokens. A project package (.rgispkg) also embeds linked rasters within a size limit, while large files read in place, database and web layers stay linked; it opens as a new, unsaved project.

Relative linked paths, including bare paths in older or hand-written files, are interpreted against the project's folder, never the process's working directory. Resolution is lexical: it does not follow symbolic links. Avoid .. after a symlinked directory; choose the direct data location instead.

On the backstage's Start or New page, choose a blank Map, the World Atlas sample or Open…. Save and Save As write the project, named after its file; a project opened from a file is named after that file too. See Project items for the other files RustGIS reads and writes.

Changes to the project are commands, and each can be undone (Ctrl+Z) and redone (Ctrl+Y). Undo keeps the last 40 changes; starting or opening another project clears it. The desktop app also keeps a copy of unsaved work and offers it back after a crash: see Autosave and recovery. Exports and other files already written are not undone.

Repair Data Source¶

If a linked file moved or was renamed, right-click its layer or local PMTiles/MBTiles tile archive and choose Repair Data Source…. For the selected layer, use Data › Data Source › Repair Source, or find Repair Data Source (or Repair Tile Archive) in Command Search. Choose the replacement file or folder. For a container such as a GeoPackage, List Datasets reads its tables in the background; choose a table when there is more than one. The existing table is retained when available. Repair keeps the layer's identity and configuration, marks the project unsaved and can be undone or redone. A raster drawn with its own color table requires a replacement with a color table; incompatible rasters are rejected without changing the saved style. If a tile archive is removed or reordered out of its captured slot while the dialog is open, the dialog closes rather than applying the replacement to another archive. It does not change embedded data, databases or web links. The web app cannot link to files on your computer: add the file again with Add Data.

CLI and Python use the same commands: layer.repairSource with {"layer":"Cities","path":"/data/towns.fgb"} (and optional "table"), or map.repairTiles with {"index":0,"path":"/data/tiles.pmtiles"}. Tile archives can also be selected by "name" or catalog "id".

Keyboard shortcuts¶

On macOS, Cmd takes the place of Ctrl. Help › Shortcuts lists them all in the app, from the same table the app runs them from. While you type in a text field, undo and redo take back its typing, not the project's last change.