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Working on the canvas

The canvas is an infinite, zoomable surface. Nodes snap to a 20-pixel grid, connections are drawn between them, and everything you do is saved immediately.

ActionHow
PanDrag empty canvas, or two-finger scroll on a trackpad
ZoomMouse wheel / pinch. Range is 10% - 200%
Fit everything in viewThe fit view button in the bottom-left controls
Zoom in / out by stepThe + / − buttons in the same cluster
OverviewThe minimap in the bottom-right shows the whole board with your viewport as a rectangle; drag it to jump

Your position and zoom are remembered per board on this device. Below about 30% zoom connection lines are hidden for legibility (a small indicator tells you so); zoom back in to see them.

Creating nodes​

There are five ways to put something on the board.

Quick actions. Expand the context panel on the right (chevron at its edge) and use the grid at the top. Notes, Events, Predictions, Embeds, Media, Locations, Documents, News Articles, Social Posts, RSS Feeds and Regions can be created here; Locations, Documents and Regions open a short form first. Actors, Organizations and Narratives are created from their own sections further down the panel because they are entities that can be shared by several nodes.

Keyboard. With the canvas focused, Shift plus a letter creates that type at the centre of your view - Shift+N Note, Shift+E Event and so on. Full table in Keyboard shortcuts.

Double-click empty canvas to drop a Note at that point.

Paste (Ctrl/Cmd+V) with the canvas focused:

Clipboard containsYou get
An imageMedia node, image copied into the board's storage
Twitter/X, Reddit or Bluesky post URLSocial Post node, post fetched immediately
YouTube URLEmbed node with preview
Direct image URLMedia node
Any other URLNews Article node - scraped and summarized in the background
Plain textNote (first line becomes the title)

Ask the assistant. Anything the AI can research it can also create. See AI assistant.

Selecting​

  • Click a node to select it. The context panel switches to its details.
  • Shift+drag on empty canvas draws a selection box.
  • Shift+click (or Ctrl/Cmd+click) adds to the selection.
  • With several nodes selected the context panel shows a summary and the status bar shows a Delete selected button.
  • Esc clears the selection.

Selected nodes are also what the AI treats as "context" - the assistant sees whatever you have selected when you send a message. Selecting three articles and asking "what do these have in common?" is the fastest way to point it at specific material.

Editing​

Select a node and click Edit in the context panel. Every node type has its own editor: notes get a Markdown text area, events get date, time, timezone, location and sources, media get captions and analysis buttons, and so on. Fields save as you leave them; there is no OK button. Click the node's title area on the canvas to edit the title in place.

Each node also carries a set of common fields you will see in every editor:

  • Tags - free-form labels, searchable.
  • Content timestamp - when the thing the node describes happened, separate from when you created the node. It has a precision (exact, day, month, year, approximate) and an optional end, and it is what places non-Event nodes on the timeline.
  • Color - overrides the type's default accent.
  • Locked - prevents accidental moves.

Collapsing​

Every node has a chevron in its header to collapse it to a title bar. The collapse / expand all button in the bottom-left controls does the whole board at once, which is useful on dense boards before an auto-layout.

Resizing​

Media and Region nodes have drag handles on their edges. Media keeps its aspect ratio; regions are free-form. Sizes are saved with the node.

Moving​

Drag a node to move it. Drag any node in a multi-selection to move them all. Moving a Region moves the nodes inside it. Locked nodes don't move.

Deleting​

Select and press Delete or Backspace, use the Delete button in the context panel (click twice - the first click asks for confirmation), or the status-bar button for a multi-selection. Deleting a node removes its connections. Deleting an Actor, Organization or Narrative node removes it from the canvas but keeps the entity - it is still listed in the context panel and can be placed again. To remove the entity itself, delete it from its section in the context panel.

Undo and redo​

Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z (or Ctrl+Y) redoes node creation, deletion, moves and connection changes. The same controls are in the title bar. Text edits inside an editor use the editor's own undo.

Press / for the search overlay. It matches against node titles on the current board as you type; ↑/↓ and Enter jump the viewport to the node and select it. For full-text search across node bodies, article text, actor bios and narratives, ask the assistant - its search_board tool uses the database's full-text index.

Filtering what you see​

Two filter panels sit in the controls cluster:

  • Filter by node type - tick and untick types to hide them; counts per type are shown.
  • Narrative filter - choose a narrative and everything not in it is dimmed. See Narratives.

Filters affect only the display; hidden nodes are still on the board and still visible to the AI.

Right-click menu​

Right-clicking a node opens a menu for narrative work: add to or remove from a narrative, ask the AI to suggest narratives for the node, or generate a summary of a narrative it belongs to.