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.

Updated November 9, 2026

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; the caret lands where you clicked. On a phone or tablet, tap the note to select it, then tap it again where you want to type, or double-tap it, and the keyboard comes up. Click or tap away — or press Esc — to finish; your edits are shared live with collaborators as you type, so there is no separate "cancel". ⌘Z undoes inside the note, and the note's undo history survives closing and reopening it. Right after a colour, font, size or Center in the box from the toolbar, ⌘Z takes that back first.

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, and Tx — clear formatting (⌘\), which strips the selection back to the note's own font and size while keeping links and comments. ⌥F10 (Alt+F10 on Windows) takes you from the note's text to that toolbar, and Esc brings you back.

Lists come from the toolbar. In a bulleted or numbered list, Tab tucks an item under the one above and ⇧Tab brings it back out; outside a list, Tab types two spaces. Neither key takes you out of the note.

Typing - or > at the start of a line, or backticks around a word, leaves them as you typed them: nothing turns into a list, a quote or code. A line that starts with - starts the next one with a dash too when you press Enter. Quotes and code already in older notes stay, drawn quietly in the note's own font.

Pasting from Google Docs, Word or a web page brings the words, structure and emphasis but not the source's font, size or background, so pasted text matches the rest of the note. Blank lines between paragraphs stay, and linked words keep their link.

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.

Right-clicking while you are editing gives you the browser's text menu — Paste, Copy, Look Up, Emoji & Symbols — not the card menu. A right-click on a note you are not editing gives the card menu as usual.

Right to left

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu run right to left on their own, line by line, in notes, documents, comments and messages. One note can hold an English line and an Arabic line, each running its own way. Menus and buttons stay as they are, and a screenplay keeps its layout.

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.

Enter starts the next item unticked, even after a ticked one; at the very start of a ticked item it opens a new, unticked item above. Checklists don't nest, so Tab does nothing in one, and ⇧Tab turns the item back into a plain line. On a phone or tablet each box takes a fingertip, and a tap never ticks the box next to it.

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.

Automatic links

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. Words pasted with a link — from a web page, an email or a document — keep their address, so they stay clickable.

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 → Card defaults sets the background, text colour, font and size every new note starts with.

Spellcheck

On a computer, 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.

On a phone or tablet, a note types the way everything else on the device does: the keyboard's autocorrect, automatic capitals and spellcheck are on. Grammarly stays off there too. Neither is a setting.

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