Mobile Experience
Touch gestures, bottom sheets, and the Nexus Dock — Neural Garden on phones and tablets.
Touch navigation
On mobile, tap and drag the background to pan. Pinch to zoom in and out — pinch works anywhere on the canvas, including over a node card, so you don't have to find an empty patch to zoom. Outside the canvas — help, the gallery, a shared link, the landing page — pinch zooms the page like any other website when you're in a browser tab. The app you added to your home screen keeps a fixed page scale, so taps always land exactly where you touch. In Timeline ↓ and Timeline → modes, single-finger pan also works directly over cards (node dragging is disabled in those modes since the layout is automatic). Double-tap empty space to create a new thought. Tap a node to select it, then tap again to open its editor in the bottom sheet. Selecting a node also pops a + handle out of each side (left = parent side, right = child side): tap one to add a thought that way, or pull it and let go on another thought to connect the two, or on empty canvas to create a connected thought right there. The handle's touch target is finger-sized even though the circle is small, and it works at every zoom level — even where thoughts are only dots, the one you drag over lights up and shows its name. The reminder beside it reads 'Tap or drag' until you've tried both.
Bottom sheet editor
On mobile, the thought editor appears as an iOS-style bottom sheet that slides up from the bottom. You can drag it to four snap points — peek, half, three-quarter, and near-full screen. It opens at the half point however you got there — from a card, a link, or a search result — even if the keyboard was still up when you chose. Swipe down to close. While you're editing text in the sheet, touches on the text belong to the text: dragging the cursor or a selection handle, or holding a word and sliding to extend the selection, won't move or close the sheet — use the handle at the top to resize it, or, once nothing is selected, pull down on any part of the sheet outside the text. The sheet stays open as you interact with the canvas, so you can pan and select other nodes without losing your editing context. The canvas keeps your place while the sheet moves: at the lower snap points it slides what you were looking at up into the space above the sheet without changing the zoom, at near-full screen it leaves the view alone, and when the sheet closes your original view returns exactly — unless you panned somewhere new in the meantime, in which case your new spot wins.
Long-press interactions
Long-press is the mobile equivalent of right-click. On the canvas background, a quick long-press (200ms) enables drag-to-select mode for box selection, and a longer hold (600ms) opens the canvas context menu. Holding on a connection line opens that edge's menu (edit label, flip direction, delete) — the same one right-click gives on desktop. Holding directly on a thought (600ms, finger still) opens that thought's context menu — Edit, Open as Garden, Add Child, Move Into…, and more — or the selection menu when the thought is part of a multi-selection. Dragging is unaffected: the moment your finger moves, the pending menu is cancelled and the drag proceeds as usual — and even after a menu has opened, moving your finger without lifting dismisses it and hands the gesture straight to the drag, so you can preview the menu and still reposition the thought (or the whole selection) in one press. Items listed inside a thought work like the iOS Reminders app: hold briefly and the row pops to show it's ready to drag — reorder it in the list, drop it into another thought, or drop it on the canvas to move it out; keep holding without moving and the row's own menu opens (Open in Panel, Move Out, Delete); move again with the menu open and it hides while the drag resumes under your finger.
Panel row actions
In the side panels — gardens, bookmarks, saved views, and trash — each row's actions live behind a ⋮ menu on mobile, since there's no hover to reveal them. Tap the ⋮ on the right of a row to rename, delete, restore, or run its other actions. On desktop these same actions appear as icons when you hover over the row.
Nexus Dock
The Nexus Dock is a bottom bar on mobile that gives quick access to search and your most-used thoughts. Tap the search orb to open search, or swipe through the node shortcut icons to jump to important thoughts — each icon shows the type icon (and color) of the actual node it links to, ordered by connection count. The dock smoothly animates between dock mode and expanded chat mode. Opening it dims the garden behind it, so the bar and its results read as a layer in front — tap the dimmed area to close. Once you start typing and the keyboard comes up, the bar slides down to sit just above the keys and widens toward the screen edges, so you get the most room for what you are typing; it eases back to its usual place when the keyboard goes away. When the keyboard is up for anything else — a thought you are editing, a list search on a card, a field in the side panel — the bar slides out of the way and comes back once the keyboard is gone, so it never sits over what you are typing into.
Swipe-to-indent in the editor
While editing a thought on mobile, flick horizontally on any line to manage list indentation without using a keyboard. Swipe right to wrap a plain line in a bullet list, or to indent a list item one level deeper. Swipe left to outdent, or to unwrap a top-level list item back to a paragraph. The gesture operates on whichever line you swiped on — you don't have to move the cursor first. It's a quick, single-finger flick, so it never fights the system's text gestures: dragging the cursor, dragging a selection handle, or holding on a word and then sliding to extend the selection all work as they normally do, and a slow horizontal drag is left to the text rather than nesting the line. On iOS you can also hold the spacebar to turn the keyboard into a trackpad and glide the cursor around, straight through wikilinks included.
Apple Pencil support
Neural Garden recognizes Apple Pencil input on iPad. Double-tap with the Pencil to create a new thought. Long-press with the Pencil to open context menus. The app distinguishes between finger and pencil input for a natural experience.
Sync status on a phone
The cloud icon at the top right shows whether your changes have reached the server. While a garden is open, a number beside it counts changes still waiting; it reads "Offline" when the network is gone and "Sync paused" when the server cannot be reached or you need to sign in again — in every one of those cases your work is kept on the phone and sent as soon as it can be. Tap the icon for the details and, when you are back online with changes waiting, a "Sync now" button. Screen readers hear each change of state as it happens.
Crash reporting
If your mobile browser force-closes the app tab — usually the operating system reclaiming memory — Neural Garden notices on your next visit and sends a small crash report so stability issues can be tracked down and fixed. The report contains technical details only (browser and device type, memory usage, how many thoughts were on screen, and which canvas effects were enabled); it never includes the content of your thoughts.