Organizing the Canvas

Canvases grow fast. These tools keep them readable — selection, alignment, groups, colors, and one-key auto-layout.

Selecting nodes

• Box select — left-click and drag across empty canvas to draw a selection box.
• Add to selection — hold Shift and click individual nodes to add or remove them.
• Select all — ⌘A.
• Deselect — Esc.

Align, distribute, and group

When two or more nodes are selected, a floating toolbar appears with:

1. Align top — lines up the selected nodes along their top edges.
2. Distribute horizontally / Distribute vertically — evens out the spacing (needs at least 3 nodes).
3. Group selection — wraps the selection in a group.

Use cases

• Select a row of source nodes and Align top + Distribute horizontally for a clean reading order.
• Grab a messy cluster of brainstorm notes and group them into "Ideas" before moving on.

Groups

A group is a container with a dashed border and an editable label (it starts as "Untitled"):

• Drag the group to move all its children as a unit.
• Resize the group by dragging its edges.
• Select a group to get two extra actions: Ungroup (dissolve the container, keep the nodes) and Tidy up (auto-arrange just the nodes inside it).

See Group Node for details.

Use cases

• Group each chapter's notes on a studying canvas so you can shuffle whole chapters around.
• Keep "raw sources" and "conclusions" in separate labeled groups on a research canvas.

Node colors

Give nodes a color to encode meaning:

1. Select a node and click the Change Color swatch.
2. Pick from the Pick a color grid.
3. Choosing stone (the default shade) resets the node to no color.

Use cases

• Color-code by status while planning: green = done, amber = in progress, red = blocked.
• Mark primary sources one color and your own commentary another.

Minimize and maximize

• Chat nodes have a per-node collapse toggle to shrink them down to a header.
• Right-click the canvas and use the View menu's Minimize All / Maximize All to collapse or expand every chat and text node at once.

Use cases

• Minimize all before a review pass — you see the structure of your thinking, not walls of text.

Focus a node

Double-click a Text node's header to center the view on it.

Copy, paste, and duplicate

• Copy — ⌘C copies the selected nodes (toast: "Copied N node(s)").
• Paste — ⌘V pastes them at your cursor position (toast: "Pasted N node(s)").
• Duplicate — use the Duplicate action on a node to clone it, offset to the right.

Use cases

• Copy a configured chat node (model, persona, connections in place) as a template for new questions.
• Duplicate a text node to fork a draft while keeping the original intact.

Delete and restore

Select nodes and press Backspace/Delete. A toast appears with a Restore button so you can undo the deletion.

Restoring a deleted node does not restore its RAG embeddings — re-index the content if you rely on AI Search or RAG over that node.

Tidy Up

Tidy Up runs an automatic left-to-right layout over the whole canvas, arranging nodes by their connections. Trigger it three ways:

1. Press 0.
2. Click the broom icon in the toolbar.
3. Right-click → View → Tidy Up.

A selected group also offers its own Tidy up that only rearranges that group's children.

Use cases

• After a fast brainstorm where you dropped nodes everywhere, one keypress turns chaos into a readable flow.
• Before exporting or sharing a screenshot, tidy up so the context flow reads left to right.