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.

Moving nodes

Hover a node and a grip icon fades in at the center of its title bar — the header is the node's drag handle. Drag it to move the node without disturbing the content below. When you're zoomed out past the point where nodes are readable, drag the node's title pill instead.

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.