The Canvas
Navigate, arrange, and organize your infinite thinking space.
Pan, zoom, and navigate
The canvas is an infinite space. Click and drag the background to pan, or scroll with two fingers on a trackpad. Pinch to zoom, or hold Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (Windows, Linux) while scrolling to zoom toward your cursor. On a Mac, holding the Control key gives you an eagle-eye view — the canvas zooms out to show everything, and releasing dives back in at your mouse position (tune it under canvas settings). Subtle concentric rings around the canvas center, with a small crosshair at the origin, help you gauge how far you've panned — and how far you've zoomed: ring spacing stays fixed in the world, so sparse rings mean you're zoomed in close and dense faint rings mean you're far out. Once you have at least one thought, panning gently stops at the edge of your thoughts — you can push the outermost node almost to the edge of the screen but never so far that everything leaves the view, so you won't get lost in empty space. If a zoom nudges your thoughts past that edge, the canvas glides back to bring them into view instead of snapping.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Cmd/Ctrl + Scroll / Pinch | Zoom in or out |
| Scroll / Click + Drag background | Pan the canvas |
| F | Fit all content in view |
| Cmd/Ctrl + / Cmd/Ctrl - | Zoom in / out |
| Hold Control (Mac only) | Eagle eye — see everything, release to dive back in |
Selecting nodes
Click a node to select it. Hold Shift and click to add more nodes to your selection. Drag a rectangle on the background to box-select multiple nodes. Use Cmd+A (Ctrl+A on Windows) to select everything.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Click | Select a node |
| Shift + Click | Add to selection |
| Drag background | Box select |
| Cmd/Ctrl + A | Select all |
Locking placement
When you have nodes selected, the toolbar that floats beneath them includes a lock button (between Tidy Up and Delete). Lock freezes the selected nodes' position so a stray drag won't move them, and Align, Tidy Up, and the other arrange tools skip them. Locked nodes render slightly dimmer so you can tell at a glance what's pinned — and everything else (selecting, editing, connecting) keeps working. While locked, the button shows a blue open-lock icon — click it to release them. Locks are remembered per node on this device.
Creating thoughts
Double-click (or double-tap on mobile) any empty space on the canvas to create a new thought. When zoomed out, a lightweight inline title input appears right at the current zoom level — no need to zoom in first. When zoomed in, the full editor opens. You can also press Cmd+N or use the command bar (Cmd+K) and type a name.
Level of detail
Nodes adapt their appearance based on zoom level, like a map moving between street and country views. When zoomed in (above 80%), you see the full card. The full card itself has two stages: near the threshold it opens condensed — title and content, with small counts showing how many nested thoughts and links it carries — and its properties, backlinks, and nested-children sections unfold as you zoom in past 100%. Zooming out steps down through progressively lighter views: a compact card (title, snippet, and the same counts), then a chip (title with child and connection counts), then a dot with a label, and finally a minimal colored dot at the furthest zoom. Long titles stay readable: the full card always shows the complete title, the compact card and chip give it two lines before trimming, and hovering any node whose title is cut off reveals the whole thing in a tooltip. On desktop these views morph smoothly into one another as you zoom — the marker and title hold their place while the surrounding card fades in or out; on phones the views switch in discrete steps. Each view has one consistent size; labels brighten with each level up and grow when a thought moves from map-style labels to cards — so next to each other, a more detailed thought reads as more important, the way country labels outweigh city labels on a map. At the deepest zoom most dot labels fade away to keep the overview clean, but hovering over or selecting any dot fades its name back in, and dots with connected children keep their name and collapse chevron visible. When a dot's name is showing, the name itself is clickable — you don't have to hit the dot. No thought ever disappears — every node stays on the canvas at every zoom level. You can edit node titles inline at any zoom level — press Enter or double-click a node without needing to zoom in.
Smart detail
Like a map showing major cities before small towns, important thoughts keep more detail while zoomed out. A thought's importance comes from its connections, backlinks, nested children, how much you've written in it, and how recently you created or edited it — so within the same cluster, the busiest and freshest thoughts bloom into richer views first as you zoom in, while lightly connected thoughts wait for closer zoom. The most important few become landmarks that keep their name visible even when everything else has shrunk to bare dots. Importance changes when a thought shows more detail, never how big it draws — every view keeps its one consistent size. Nothing is ever hidden: every thought stays visible at every zoom. Timeline and Outline modes keep uniform detail, and Gravity has its own physics, so smart detail applies in the other arrange modes. Turn it off under canvas settings → Canvas → Smart detail.
Focus dimming
When you select or edit a thought, the canvas gently fades everything except that thought, its directly connected neighbors, and the connections between them — like a map highlighting the place you tapped. Click empty canvas to clear the selection and restore full brightness. Focus dimming applies in every arrange mode except Gravity, which has its own focus behavior. You can turn it off under canvas settings → Canvas → Focus dimming.
Arrange modes
The canvas toolbar or command bar (Cmd+K, type >) lets you switch between layout modes: Manual, Outline, Grid, Force, Tree (vertical and horizontal), Radial, Cluster, Timeline ↓ (vertical journal), Timeline → (horizontal timeline), Gravity, and Town. You can sort nodes by title, type, created date, updated date, or connection count, and group them by type or cluster. These settings are saved per-garden, so each workspace remembers its layout.
Town view
Town view shows your garden's entire nested hierarchy on one living map. Every level of nested thoughts loads onto the canvas and is arranged instantly — children orbit their parent in a compact spiral, bigger branches sit nearer the center, and nothing overlaps. Connected thoughts pull toward each other too: when two branches are linked, they're placed in the same neighborhood of the map instead of on opposite sides. There's no waiting for a layout to settle: the map appears in its final shape right away, even with hundreds of thoughts. The arrangement is remembered — reopening Town view (or reloading) restores it instantly instead of re-arranging. Drag a thought and the map makes room with minimal shuffling: overlapping neighbors step aside while everything else stays put. The map reads like a real one: busier thoughts (more content, links, and connections) reach more detail sooner as you zoom, and top-level thoughts keep their names visible even from the farthest zoom, like city names on a country map. Nesting depth drives detail too: every thought stays visible at every zoom, but deeper thoughts carry less detail until you zoom closer — and thoughts stay at compact detail even fully zoomed in, keeping the map scannable (open the side panel to edit content). Town positions live only in this view — connecting and deleting are disabled while it's active, though selecting and editing thought content work normally. Town view works on phones too; to stay smooth it loads fewer thoughts, and very large hierarchies load their upper levels first and stop at a device-friendly limit, so you always get the top of the map instead of a slow or stuck canvas — zoom or drill into a branch to explore deeper. Switch back to any other arrange mode to return to the normal single-level canvas.
Filtering by type
The funnel button in the canvas toolbar (and Filter in the canvas right-click menu) opens the type filter — the same searchable type list you use when assigning types to a thought, including subtypes. Every type starts checked; uncheck a type to hide those thoughts from the canvas, and use the All and None shortcuts to reset or clear in one click. Thoughts whose type isn't in your Types garden are governed by the "untyped" row. Filtering is a view — nothing is deleted, and unchecking it back restores everything.
Timeline modes
Timeline ↓ stacks dated thoughts vertically like a journal — newest on top, with a right-side date rail showing day, month, and year markers as you zoom. Timeline → arranges them horizontally as a chronological band, oldest to newest left-to-right, with the date rail above the cards. Both modes auto-fit on entry and center today. Click the + buttons on the rail between dates to fill in missing days. Days with no entries collapse into a single + so the view stays tight.
Nested canvases (sub-gardens)
Every thought can become its own canvas. Drill into any thought to enter a focused sub-garden where you can add child thoughts, make connections, and organize ideas independently. The breadcrumb bar at the top shows your current depth (e.g. Home > Research > Topic) and lets you navigate back up to any level. On smaller screens, intermediate breadcrumbs collapse behind a '...' menu.
Expand and collapse
Nodes connected by edges can be collapsed to hide their downstream children. Click the chevron arrow on the right side of any parent node to toggle its children. This works at every zoom level. Collapsed nodes smoothly fade out and the layout re-arranges automatically. Use Cmd+K search to find a collapsed node — its ancestors expand automatically to reveal it.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Cmd/Ctrl + Left or Up | Collapse selected node |
| Cmd/Ctrl + Right or Down | Expand selected node |
| Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Left or Up | Collapse all |
| Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Right or Down | Expand all |
Viewport fitting
Press F to fit all visible content into your viewport. If you have nodes selected, it fits just the selection. The fit accounts for any open sidebar or panel, so content is always centered in the visible area.
Context menus
Right-click (or long-press on mobile) on nodes, edges, or the canvas background to access context-sensitive actions. Node context menus let you edit, delete, duplicate, nest, and connect. Edge context menus let you flip direction, insert a node on the edge, or delete. Canvas context menus let you create new thoughts, paste, add a color region (in the free/Manual layout only), or change layout.
Canvas background
Canvas settings → Canvas has three toggles for how the canvas reads: Radial rings (the distance rings around center), Type zones, and Color regions. Type zones glow a soft color behind each Type's most significant thoughts — sized by how much of the garden that type represents — so heavily-used types read as tinted areas of the canvas without any manual setup. Color regions are ones you draw yourself: right-click the canvas and choose "Add Color Region" to place a named, colored zone. Drag its top-left label to move the region, its bottom-right corner to resize it, and the grip handle that fades in when you hover the region to drag it together with every thought inside it. Double-click the region's name to rename it, and click its color dot to cycle colors. Regions only appear in the free (Manual) arrange mode — the auto-arrange modes move thoughts around, so switching to one hides your regions until you return to Manual.