A quick question about one sentence shouldn't leave a new node on your canvas. In Slashspace 4.1 it doesn't: the answer opens in a quick popup chat right by the sentence. When you close it, the canvas is exactly as you left it.
4.1 also lets text nodes mention other nodes with @, adds Find on the canvas with Cmd+F, and makes the app about a quarter of the size. Here's why each one exists, and how it works.
You could always select text in a reply and ask about it. But most of those questions are small. "What does this term mean?" "Is this number right?" And every one of them started a new branch, so a canvas slowly filled up with one-line nodes you never looked at again. You needed a light way to ask, and a way to keep the answer only when it's worth keeping.
So now the answer opens in a quick popup chat instead. Select text in a reply as before, type your question in the Ask about this box, and press Enter. The popup chat opens right by your selection. The answer streams in, you can ask follow-ups, and the chat knows everything the original chat knows: its conversation, its model, and the notes, documents and web pages connected to it.
Close the popup and the chat is gone, with nothing added to your canvas. If the answer turns out to matter, press Keep as branch and it becomes a branch of the original chat, with the whole conversation. Want a branch straight away, like before? Press Cmd+Enter instead of Enter.
Notes are where you pull your thinking together, and that thinking lives in other nodes: the chat where you found the answer, the paper you read, the image you made. A note had no way to point at them, so you described them and went looking for them later.
Now, type @ in a text node and pick any node on the canvas. It goes in as a chip with the node's icon. Hover the chip to preview the node, with its title, a few lines of its text or its picture, and press Go to node to jump to it.
Mentions are references, not connections. They don't draw a line between nodes or change what a chat reads, so you can point at anything without rewiring your canvas.
Canvases get big, and "where did I see that?" used to mean dragging around and zooming in on node after node. Your browser has had Find forever. Your canvas didn't.
Now, press Cmd+F (Ctrl+F on Windows and Linux) and type. Slashspace highlights every match in every node, shows how many there are, and pans the canvas to each one as you press Enter. It keeps up as replies stream in and as you type.
You shouldn't download half a gigabyte for every update, least of all on a slow connection or a full laptop. But Slashspace took about 2 GB on disk, and every update was around 550 MB, because the app carried many copies of code it never needed.
We cleared those out without removing anything you use. In 4.1 the app is about 380 MB, and updates are around 140 MB, about a quarter of what they were.
See the full 4.1.0 changelog for everything.
If you have Slashspace installed, it will update itself. Restart the app when it asks, and you're on 4.1. New here? Download Slashspace for Mac, Windows or Linux. Plans are $89 a year or $249 once for every future version, both refundable within 7 days.
Tell us what you think in our Discord or at support@slashspace.ai. We read everything.