The canvas

A cluster's Board view is an infinite canvas. You pan with Space or H, zoom with Cmd and plus or minus, and place cards anywhere. A tool rail runs down the left edge, right-clicking gives you a full menu wherever you clicked, and your zoom and pan position are remembered per cluster so reopening resumes where you left off.

Updated October 25, 2026

The canvas is a cluster's Board view, and where a new cluster opens. It is an unbounded surface — position means something here, which is the whole point. Two images side by side are being compared; an image with a note under it is being annotated.

If you want the same contents as a sortable file browser instead, every cluster also has its files, listed in the sidebar — press F and they fill the screen as the full Files page.

Moving around

Your position is saved per cluster. Close a board deep in a corner of the canvas and it reopens there, not at the origin.

If scrolling to zoom is the habit you arrived with — it is how PureRef and Miro work — Settings → Appearance → Scroll wheel swaps the two, so a plain scroll zooms at the pointer and ⌘, Alt or Shift pans. Pinching a trackpad zooms in either setting. See keyboard shortcuts.

If you would rather steer with the keyboard, Settings → Appearance → Move with W A S D lets you hold W, A, S or D to move around and Q or E to zoom in or out, with ⇧ to go faster. It is off until you turn it on, because A and D are also the Arrow and Free-draw keys — see moving with W A S D.

The tool rail

Down the left edge:

• Select / move (V) — the default. Click to select, drag to move, drag on empty space to marquee-select.
• Pan (H) — grab the canvas itself.
• Add image — file picker. Dragging from your desktop is usually faster.
• Add note (N) — a rich-text note.
• Add doc — a document card.
• Add cluster — a nested board.
• Add grid (G) — a grid.
• Arrow (A) — connect two things.

The + at the top of the rail opens the rest, grouped:

• Tools — Draw (D), Shape, Palette
• Create — File, Folder (on a desktop browser), Link, Linked cluster
• Annotate — Comment, Vote

Right-click

Right-clicking is the fastest path to almost everything, and the menu differs by what is under the cursor.

On empty canvas: Add (Cards / Visual / Web / Annotate), Paste, Select all, Background colour, Reset zoom, Export to PNG or PDF, and Clear all drawings.

On a card: everything specific to that card kind, plus the universal operations — duplicate, delete, layer order, tag, comment, copy link.

On a group: rename, outline shape and colour, add to group, ungroup, group comment, group tag.

Inside text you are editing: your browser's own menu, not ours. Right-clicking mid-sentence in a note is a text gesture, so you get Paste, Copy, Look Up and Emoji & Symbols rather than card operations. Click away first to get the card menu.

Panels that float above the canvas — the colour picker, image adjustments, grid cell menus — swallow the right-click rather than passing it to the card behind them. The exception is a text field inside one, which again defers to the browser, so you can paste a hex code straight into the picker.

Double-clicking empty canvas opens the add menu right at your cursor. On a long canvas this beats travelling to the rail and back.

Selection

Click to select. Shift-click to add. Drag on empty canvas to marquee.

With a finger, touch and hold empty canvas until the ring under it fills, then drag the box. A finger has no Shift, so holding and letting go opens the canvas menu with Select…: until Done, each tap adds a card or takes it out. See touch on the canvas.

With several cards selected you can move them as one, align them, delete them together, or press ⌘G to make them a group — which is a selection that persists, gets a name, and can be commented on as a unit.

On a computer, two or more picked get a bar along the bottom of the canvas: how many, Tidy up and Align (with Distribute), Group, New cluster from N cards and Move N cards to…, then ⋯ for the rest of the right-click menu, and Delete. Each does what the right-click menu does with the same selection.

Drawing

Press D for the freehand tool. Draw straight onto the canvas over and around cards; strokes are their own layer, so they do not attach to a card and do not move when you move one.

The eraser removes whole strokes rather than nibbling at them, which is what you want when annotating in a hurry. Clear all drawings in the canvas right-click menu removes them in one go.

For a bigger drawing surface, the sketch pad overlay covers the whole viewport. For a drawing that belongs to the board as an object you can move and resize, use an art canvas card instead.

Background

Right-click → Background colour. Seven presets plus a custom picker, set per cluster. Useful for separating a scratch board from a client-facing one at a glance.

Getting it out

Right-click → Export gives you the whole board as a PNG or a PDF. See Exporting a board for what is included and what is not.

If you are building a specific kind of board, these walk through the whole workflow: mood board maker · reference board maker.

Machine-readable: /docs/canvas.md · /llms.txt
What changed and when: /changelog