Notes

A note is a rich-text card you can put anywhere on a canvas. Press N to add one. Notes support formatting, checklists and @-mentions of other boards, docs and cards, they auto-link URLs into previews, and two people can type in the same note at once and see each other's cursors.

A note is the general-purpose card: a caption, a brief, a to-do list, a paragraph of context beside a set of images. Press N, or right-click where you want it.

For anything longer than a few paragraphs, use a document instead — it has pages, a proper toolbar and export.

Writing

Double-click a note to start editing. Click away to commit; press Esc to cancel.

Formatting works as you would expect: ⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘U for bold, italic and underline. A toolbar appears at the bottom of the canvas while a note is focused, carrying colour, size, font and alignment.

With the caret merely placed in a note and nothing selected, formatting applies to the whole note rather than doing nothing. This is deliberate — it is almost always what you meant.

Checklists

Start a line with a checkbox from the toolbar to make a task list. Boxes are clickable directly on the canvas without entering edit mode, so a note can serve as a live shot list or a packing list that anyone on the board can tick off.

Mentions

Type @ to mention another cluster, document, card, tag or person. The mention becomes a real link with a hover preview, and it registers as a backlink on the thing you mentioned — so that item's panel can show everywhere it is referenced.

See Links and mentions.

Paste or type a URL into a note and it becomes a link, with a preview card on hover. You do not have to do anything to make this happen.

Names that match an existing tag or entity are also detected and quietly underlined, so a note that says "Diner" connects itself to the Diner entity you already created elsewhere.

Working together

Notes are collaborative in real time. Two people can type in the same note at once, with visible carets showing who is where. Edits merge — there is no last-write-wins overwrite and no lock.

Colours and defaults

A note's background and text colour are set from the toolbar or the right-click menu. Text colour is always resolved for readability, so a note stays legible if someone switches between light and dark themes.

To stop setting the same thing every time, Settings → Defaults sets the background, text colour, font and size every new note starts with.

Spellcheck

Browser spellcheck and Grammarly are switched off inside notes on purpose. Their injected markup conflicted with the collaborative editor and could corrupt formatting mid-sentence. This is not a setting.

Frequently asked questions

Can two people edit the same note at once?

Yes. Notes are collaborative in real time, with visible carets for whoever else is typing. Edits merge rather than overwriting each other.

Why is there no spellcheck underline?

Browser and Grammarly spellcheck are deliberately disabled inside notes. Their injected markup fought with the collaborative editor and corrupted formatting.

How do I resize a note?

Drag its corner. Notes also grow downward on their own as you type past the bottom edge.

Machine-readable: /docs/canvas/notes.md · /llms.txt