Canvases and folders

Exploratory work rarely fits on one canvas. A project grows into a canvas per question, source batch or draft, and you return to them over weeks. Folders keep each project together.

Every canvas is also a plain folder on your disk: ordinary files that you own and can back up.

The sidebar

The sidebar on the left lists your folders and canvases. It calls canvases spaces, which is why its button says New Space. The top holds New Folder, New Space and a Search field. The bottom holds Settings and the theme toggle.

To hide or show it, click the panel button at the top left of the canvas (Hide Sidebar or Show Sidebar). Drag its right edge to resize it.

Create canvases and folders

Click New Space to create a canvas at the top level and open it. To create one inside a folder, hover the folder and click its + button, or choose New Space from the folder's ⋮ menu.

A new canvas is named "untitled" ("untitled 2" if that's taken) and holds one empty chat node.

Click New Folder to add a folder named "New Folder" at the top level, then rename it.

Rename, duplicate or delete

Hover a canvas or folder and click ⋮ to open its menu.

• Rename: type the new name and press Enter (Esc cancels). Double-clicking a name does the same.
• Duplicate (canvases only): makes a full copy, with every node, connection and chat, in the same folder. A copy of "Climate" is named "Climate-copy".
• Delete: see below.

Deleting a canvas asks you to confirm (Delete Space?, then Yes, Delete) and removes its folder from your disk. It doesn't go to the Trash and can't be undone, so export anything you might want later.

A folder can only be deleted once no canvases are left in it or its subfolders. Otherwise Slashspace tells you how many it holds, so you can move or delete them first. An empty folder is deleted right away, with no confirmation, along with any other files you put in it on disk.

Move canvases and folders

Drag a canvas or folder onto a folder to move it inside; the folder highlights when you can drop. Drop on empty space in the list to move it back to the top level. Nest folders the same way, by dragging one onto another.

If the destination already has a canvas with that name, the one you move gets a number added.

Folders are listed first, A to Z. Top-level canvases are sorted by last activity, most recent first.

Search the sidebar

Type in Search to filter canvases by name. Folder names match too, so typing a folder's name lists every canvas in it. Press Esc to clear.

To find something inside a canvas, use Search instead.

Canvas limit on older plans

Some older plans cap how many canvases you can have. On those, the sidebar shows a counter such as 2 of 3 spaces, and duplicates count toward the cap. Current plans include unlimited canvases: see Plans and billing.

The canvas header

The bar across the top of the canvas shows the folder path and canvas name, such as Research / Climate / Sources. It also holds the sidebar toggle, Canvas settings and the side view toggle.

Where canvases live on disk

Everything lives in a SlashspaceOS folder in your home folder (~/SlashspaceOS on Mac, C:\Users\you\SlashspaceOS on Windows). Each sidebar folder is a real folder, and each canvas is a folder with the canvas's name.

SlashspaceOS/
├── Research/
│   └── Climate/
│       └── Sources/
│           ├── canvas.json
│           ├── Context.md
│           └── images/
└── images/

Item	What it holds
canvas.json	The whole canvas: nodes, connections, chats and layout.
Context.md	A readable summary: node titles, short previews and how nodes connect. Slashspace rewrites it whenever the canvas saves, so don't edit it.
images in a canvas	Images generated in that canvas.
images at the top	Images you paste.

Images and documents you add from elsewhere on your computer aren't copied. The canvas links to the original, so moving or deleting it can break the node.

Renaming or moving a canvas or folder in the app renames or moves its folder on disk. Characters not allowed in file names, such as / and :, become hyphens in canvas names. Don't name a folder files or images: the sidebar hides those.

Slashspace doesn't watch these files. An open canvas keeps saving over its canvas.json, so edits you make on disk can be lost. Quit Slashspace before changing anything by hand.

To back up, copy the whole SlashspaceOS folder so pasted images come along, and keep the originals of files you added. To share one canvas as Markdown or JSON, use Export. For what leaves your computer, see Privacy and your data.