First time designer user, where are my Paper UI things?

Setup, Configuration and Use Items & Sitemaps
4

I’m having flashbacks!

has a pointer to the formal syntax for Things and Items. A Bridge is a Thing. The parameters required for specific Things and how they associate with a bridge should be documented in the binding’s (online) documentation.

Edit – Binding descriptions:

One could write a JSON translator to dump into the flat-file format. I haven’t done it as my devices don’t involve discovery and I hard-coded them all. I’ve read, but have no personal experience, that manually configuring ZWave can be challenging.

Edit: If you do “export” the JSON to flat-file format, you probably want to create your rules and sitemaps and all in a different directory and then either symlink them in or otherwise copy them in to the “live” directory so that you don’t have “doubles” of the Thing and Item definitions.

You can use the Thing references in Designer without the flat files, but auto-suggest and “spell checking” won’t be there to assist you.