Cards

A card is one thing on a board. Soleil Clusters has around fourteen kinds — image, note, link, document, PDF, file, video, audio, colour palette, shape, art canvas, grid, vote and nested cluster. Every card shares the same position, size, layer and selection behaviour, so what you learn on one applies to all of them.

Updated October 21, 2026

Everything on a canvas is a card. They differ in what they hold and nothing else — position, size, stacking order, selection, grouping, tagging, commenting and duplication work identically on all of them.

Every kind

Adding one

Four ways, in rough order of speed:

1. Drag a file in from your desktop. The type is detected and the right card kind is created — see Files and media.
2. Paste. A URL becomes a link card, an image in your clipboard becomes an image card, text becomes a note.
3. Double-click empty canvas for an add menu at your cursor.
4. The tool rail or its + menu.

Cards you add without specifying a position are placed in free space, so a batch of twelve images arranges rather than stacking on top of what is already there. Files you add in Files, or with Upload in the sidebar, are the exception: they join the cluster but wait off the board until you place them. Every file in a cluster is listed in the sidebar's Files, on the board or not.

What every card does

Move by dragging. Resize from the corners. Hold Alt while dragging to ignore snapping.

Layer order — [ and ] send backward and forward. Also in the right-click menu.

Duplicate — ⌘D.

Delete — ⌫. A toast offers undo; ⌘Z also works.

Cut and paste — ⌘X / ⌘V, including across clusters. Cut-paste keeps standard clipboard behavior: the cut is undoable on the board it happened on, the paste on the board it landed on.

Move to another cluster — drag cards onto a cluster card, or onto a cluster's name in the sidebar to put them in its Files, off its board, or right-click → Move to cluster… to send them to any cluster in the workspace, including one that isn't on this canvas. A move is one action: its toast undoes both sides at once. Moving cards doesn't change how many you have.

Group — select several and press ⌘G. See Groups.

Tag — right-click → tag. See Tags.

Comment — right-click → comment, which anchors a bubble to that card. See Comments.

Copy link — a deep link that opens the board with that card selected. Useful in a message or a doc.

On a touch screen the selection carries a gold ⋯ at its top-right corner. It opens the menu a right-click would, for one card or for every selected card at once. Touch and hold a card to pick it up and move it.

Info

Right-click anything — a card, several cards, a group, the empty board, a cluster in the sidebar or a folder in Files — and choose Info, or select it and press ⌘I. A panel opens at the right with what it is and where it came from:

Several cards together get a summary — how many of each kind, their total size, and the oldest and newest. The empty board, a folder or a sidebar cluster gets the cluster's: what it holds, where it sits, and who made it.

Info follows the selection while it's open, so clicking through cards walks it through them. ⌘I again, the ×, or Esc while it has focus closes it. On a shared link, Info is in Files, and it shows dates but never names; a shared board itself has no right-click menu.

Removing a card from the board

Right-click a file — an image, video, audio clip, PDF, file, link, palette or note — and choose Remove from board to take it off the canvas without deleting it. It stays in the cluster, waiting in Files with a Not on board mark, until you drag it back onto the board or choose Put on board there. The toast that follows can undo it. ⌫ still deletes.

Titles

Most cards have a title. Double-click it to edit. Titles are searchable in ⌘K and they are what shows in Files, so a card called "Untitled" is a card you will not find later.

Shape cards are the exception — they have no title. If you need a labelled shape, put a note on top of it or use a group, which does have a name.

The card limit

The free Demo plan allows 25 cards in total across every cluster you create (older accounts keep the higher allowance they signed up under). Cards on clusters someone else owns do not count against you — if you are invited as an editor, you are spending their allowance, not yours.

Files waiting in Files, not on the board, are still cards and count the same.

Creator removes the limit entirely. See Plans.

Dropping more files than you have room for

If you drag in more files than your remaining allowance — or a folder, which counts a card for each file, while the clusters it becomes are free — Clusters asks before it uploads anything. You can add the ones that fit, upgrade to keep them all, or cancel — and until you answer, nothing is uploaded and nothing on the canvas changes. Choosing to add the ones that fit always gives you every card you still have room for; the rest stay on your disk.

Cards through the API

The REST API exposes a deliberately narrower card model than the canvas: audio, doc, file, image, link, note, palette, pdf, video. An API caller can set position, size, title, body, HTML, URL, image key, colour, a palette's colours and the card's group, and nothing else — interior state that belongs to the editor is not writable from outside.

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