Some writing is too big to hold in your head as one page — a novel, a thesis, a forty-minute talk. A Storyboard lays the whole of it out as a tree of cards in columns: the first column holds your top-level cards (chapters, acts, sections), the next column their children (scenes, arguments), and so on as deep as the work needs. You draft inside the structure, one card at a time, and always see where you are in the whole.
Help ▸ Add a Sample Storyboard drops a board called Welcome to Storyboards into this wiki — a storyboard about storyboards. Every card in it is real: edit them, move them, delete them, undo it all. It teaches the same things this chapter does, except you learn them by pressing the keys rather than reading about them. It is an ordinary page, so delete it whenever you're done and nothing else changes.
File ▸ New Storyboard, give it a name, and you're looking at one empty card — the first
thing you'll say. Press Return to write in it, Esc when you're done. Then grow the
tree from the keyboard: ⌘↓ adds a card below, ⌘↑ above, and
⌘→ adds a child — a new column opens the first time you go deeper. Prefer the
mouse? Hover any card and slim insert tabs appear on its edges — above, below, and a
child-tab on the right — each naming its shortcut as you point at it, with ✎ to edit and ✕ to
delete in the corners.
Click a card and brightness sorts the whole board by how close things are to your attention: the card itself pops solid with a green edge, its entire subtree turns solid with it, the trail that led here — its siblings and each ancestor back to the root — holds a soft wash, and everything unrelated recedes to quiet text on the background. Click a chapter and the whole chapter glows across the columns; click the background and the board settles evenly. That's the map: brightness answers "what am I looking at, and what belongs to it?" at a glance.
The board also keeps you centered: whatever you select, every column drifts so that the card, its ancestors, and its children line up in the middle of the window — the tree stays composed around your place in it, however deep you go.
Writing never comes out in order, so moving cards is first-class: ⌥↑/⌥↓ move a
card among its siblings, ⌥→ tucks it under the card above (making it a child), and
⌥← promotes it out to its parent's level — the card's whole subtree travels with it,
always. ⌘⇧↓/⌘⇧↑ merge a card into its neighbor when two thoughts turn out
to be one. Arrow keys walk the tree (↑/↓ between siblings, ← to the parent,
→ into the children), and ⌘Z undoes any structural change — including drags.
And yes, you can simply drag a card: pick it up and a green line shows where it will land — between any two cards, in any group, even under a different parent. Its whole subtree moves with it. The one refusal: a card won't drop inside its own descendants.
When a card stops being a note and becomes the draft, press ⇧Return: the card opens
fullscreen in a calm panel over the dimmed board, ready to write at length. Esc or
⌘Return saves and drops you back into the tree exactly where you were.
A card holds real formatted text, and you can type it the way you think. Markdown as you
type works: ## then a space becomes a heading, - starts a bullet list,
1. a numbered one, > a quote — the marker disappears and real formatting takes
its place, so there is no source mode to switch into. Press / for the command menu when
you want something markdown can't say — callouts, equations, diagrams, links, images, or a
transclusion of another page. ⌘B and friends work too. Three ways in, one card.
A card is a piece of writing, so it gets the same tools a page does. The format bar above the board wakes up the moment you start writing in a card — it shows what's switched on and turns it off again with a click. Select some words and the floating bar appears over them, ✦ AI button and all. / opens the command menu for links, tables, equations, diagrams, videos and the rest. And a page you name in a card lights up as a link, exactly as it would anywhere else.
A format you switch on stays on until you switch it off — across new lines too, so a whole bold paragraph is one keystroke rather than one per line. Press the same shortcut again, or click the same button, to stop.
The board you want may already exist in another tool — a card app you're leaving, an outliner, a mind-mapper. You don't have to retype it.
Copy the tree there, then click the board's background (the ground, not a card) and press
⌘V. The whole tree arrives nested exactly as it was: parents as parents, children as
children, however deep it goes. Markdown inside the cards becomes real formatting, bare web
addresses become links, and the odd bit of foreign markup other apps leave in their text — a stray
icon, a styled key — is cleaned away rather than showing up as literal characters mid-sentence.
What it understands. The clipboard format card tools copy, the file they export
(.json), and OPML — the interchange format almost every outliner writes, so
anything that can export an outline can hand you a board. Plain text with no structure comes in as
a single card, which is the honest answer when there's no tree to read.
Where you paste matters. On the ground, you're pasting a tree of cards. Inside a card you're writing in, you're pasting text into that card — which is the right behaviour, and the reason to click the background first.
The deep ground your cards float on is yours to pick: click the round swatch in the bottom-left corner and choose a backdrop — ocean, forest, plum, graphite and more — or Match my theme to follow the wiki's own colours, or pick any colour you like. Each board remembers its own, so a novel can sit on midnight blue while a research board sits on moss, and the choice travels with the document.
A storyboard is a tree, and a tree reads three ways. The Send to… button in the board's top-right corner — or File ▸ Send Storyboard To… — opens a panel beside the board showing exactly what you're about to make, so you can look before you commit. Whatever it makes lands as a new page — the board itself is never touched.
Two choices sit above the preview. The shape: a paper page or an outline page. And how much: everything, this card and everything under it, the deepest cards only, or just the column you're in. The board stays live beside the panel, so click a different card and the preview follows — which is how you send one chapter of a long board instead of the whole thing. Create page makes what you're looking at.
Outline Page gives you one row per card, titled by the card's heading, with the card's prose tucked into the row's note — a real outline you can fold, zoom, and rearrange.
Paper Page turns the structure into a document: depth becomes heading level (top cards become the largest headings, their children the next size down, and so on), each card's title becomes that heading, and the rest of the card becomes the prose beneath it. What comes out is an ordinary page — polish it, then send it anywhere MojoPad exports: PDF, Word, Markdown, ePub. Draft a book in cards; hand in a manuscript.
Send as often as you like — each one makes a fresh page, so a board can throw off drafts without ever risking the original.
You don't have to make a page first. Every export reads a board as the document it describes, using the same rule the paper page uses — depth becomes heading level. File ▸ Export Page As gives you the board as a PDF, an HTML file, Markdown or plain text; the whole-document exports, the ePub, the Word files and the website all do the same. Nowhere does the card list itself show up.
So there are two honest routes to a finished thing, and which you want depends on whether you plan to keep working. Send it to a page when you want to polish the prose, add what the board was too coarse to hold, and keep the result in the wiki where it can be searched and linked. Export the board when the cards already say it and you just need the file — a draft to email, a print-out to mark up on the train.
(The shortcuts panel steps aside while the send panel is open — the board needs the room.)
The board keeps a keyboard shortcuts panel docked on its right edge — every card
command at a glance while the grammar becomes muscle memory. Press ? to tuck it away
(or bring it back); the board remembers your choice.
Press W for live word counts — the selected card, its subtree, and the whole
board — and watch them tick up as you write. Press W again to put them away.
A storyboard is an ordinary MojoPad page underneath — the cards are stored as a nested list in the page itself. That has quiet consequences: search finds the text inside your cards, the graph and your local AI read the board like any page, and exports carry it whole. Nothing about a storyboard is a separate format that other features can't see.
Can I format text in a card? Yes, with everything you already use — ⌘B/⌘I,
the format bar at the top (it wakes the moment you start writing in a card), and the floating bar
that appears when you select words.
Can I delete the last card? No — a storyboard keeps at least one, so the page never
becomes invisible. Where did my card go after a merge? Into its neighbor: content joined,
children adopted; ⌘Z takes it back apart. Does deleting a card delete its children?
Yes — the card's subtree goes with it, and ⌘Z brings it all back.