Some thinking doesn't want to be a list — it wants to be laid out on a table: this idea next to that one, an arrow between them, the odd sticky note in the corner. A canvas is a spatial board where your pages become movable cards you can arrange, connect, resize, and edit — and it's still just a page in your wiki, so it links, versions, exports, and encrypts like everything else.
⌃⌘N), or run New Canvas… from the command
palette (⇧⌘P). Name it and you're looking at a dot grid.Esc or click the background when done.That's the whole model: pages as cards, stickies for loose thoughts, arrows for relationships, and everything editable in place.
⌫) and only the card goes; the page is untouched.☾/☀ toggle flips this board to a dark ground (see Getting
around) — a per-canvas choice, saved with the board; your colored cards keep their
light faces and pop against it.⇧-click to
multi-select; ⇧-drag on the background lassoes a group. Selected cards move
together.Double-click the board and type. A sticky is a canvas-local markdown note:
no page is created, nothing shows in your page list — but it writes like a MojoPad
note. Type # headings, - lists, **bold**, or
press / for the same insert menu pages have — headings, lists, quotes, the
lot. Click away and the card renders your markdown beautifully. When a sticky grows
up, right-click ▸ Make page… — it graduates to a real markdown page,
formatting intact. Capture loosely, promote deliberately.
Arrows you sketch are board-local — free, disposable thinking. When one turns out to be true, right-click it ▸ Make real: the relationship is promoted into the wiki itself and shows up in the graph and connections from then on. The board is where connections are tried; the graph is where they live.
Connectors take color and direction. Right-click a connector: the same 8-color picker the cards use sits at the top (the arrowheads follow the line's color), and an arrowheads section chooses where the arrow points — end, start, both ends, or none.
Not everything is an arrow. Right-click any connector to change its look — and Branch turns it into a true mind-map limb: every branch child hangs off one point at the parent's bottom, and the connector forks — a trunk down, a bar across, a drop into each child's top, MarginNote-style. The upper card is always the parent, whichever way you dragged, so the flow always reads downward, and the tree re-routes live as you move cards. Line and Dashed round out the set, and one more click — Use this style for new connectors — makes every connector you drag from then on born that way, so building a whole map never means restyling each limb. The library will keep growing.
Lasso a few cards, right-click ▸ Frame selected — a titled region that moves as one. Use frames to name neighborhoods of the board: "Evidence", "To read", "Chapter 2".
Right-click a frame for its own menu: color chips tint the region (the same palette cards use, worn lighter), Fit to contents shrink-wraps the frame around the cards it holds, and Collapse to a pill folds the whole neighborhood — its cards and their connectors hide, and the pill tells you how many cards are sleeping inside. Double-click the pill to open it again. Collapsing is how a big board stays readable: fold the neighborhoods you're not thinking about right now.
Undo works on the board. ⌘Z takes back the last board change — a move,
a delete, a connector, a color, even a full ✦ Arrange — and ⇧⌘Z brings it back.
While you're typing inside a note, undo belongs to the text, exactly like any page;
click out and it's the board's again. The camera never jumps on undo — only things
move, not your view.
Duplicate and copy. ⌘D duplicates the selected cards just beside
themselves. ⌘C copies them — connectors between copied cards ride along — and
⌘V pastes at your pointer, on this board or any other. Both live in the
card's right-click menu too.
Line things up. Select two or more cards and right-click: a compact row of
align buttons appears — left, centres, right, top, middles, bottom, and (with three or
more) distribute. While dragging a single card you'll feel it snap to the edges
and centres of its neighbours, with a hairline guide showing what it matched; hold
⌥ to drag free.
Pin what must not move. Right-click a card ▸ Lock in place — it keeps its spot through drags, group moves, and aligns (a small 🔒 rides its title). And when cards overlap, ⬆ Front / ⬇ Back in the same menu settles who's on top.
Take a picture. Right-click the background ▸ Export board as PNG… — the whole board, fit to view on the paper ground, saved wherever you point it. (It captures at your window's resolution — a bigger window makes a bigger image.)
Or just type. Click the board and start typing — a note is born under your pointer with your first keystroke already in it. Type / instead and the whole creation catalog opens right there. Thought → keystroke → card.
Right-click the board — everything that can land on a canvas is in that menu. Create fresh: a sticky, a new page, a new canvas (a board within the board), or a sketch. Bring in: an existing page, an image or file (picker), a video (YouTube, Vimeo, or a TED talk), a web page (captured as a readable article), or just Paste — the clipboard finds its shape: an image becomes an image card, a video link becomes a playing video, anything else a sticky.
⌘C) in that pane lands on the board as a card
automatically. Dragging a selection from the pane onto the board does the same
thing, no ✂ needed. Either way, the passage stays highlighted in the source,
permanently, saved with the page. Take a paper apart without ever leaving the
board.Everything here runs on your local AI and your wiki's own meaning index — private, on your Mac, nothing sent anywhere.
⇧-click or
⇧-drag a lasso), right-click ▸ ✦ Synthesize — the full Synthesis
engine writes a new note from exactly the cards you gathered. Read, excerpt,
arrange, write: the whole research loop without leaving the board.⇧-drag a box around a neighborhood of the graph
and choose Cards on a canvas… — the pages spill onto a board (new or
existing) as a grid of cards, ready to arrange and connect.Drag the background to pan; scroll wheel pans too; ⌘+scroll (or trackpad
pinch) zooms around your cursor. The zoom pill at the bottom-left does the
same visually: − and + step the zoom, the percentage snaps back to
100%, ⊡ fits the whole board in view (also on the background's right-click
menu), ▦ shows or hides the minimap, and the ☾/☀ toggle switches
this board between the light paper ground and a dark ground — a
per-canvas choice, saved with the board. The board remembers your camera position
per canvas.
The minimap floats at the bottom-right: every card and frame in miniature, with a rectangle showing where you're looking. Click anywhere on it — or drag across it — and the camera goes there. On a board of ten cards it's charming; on a board of two hundred it's how you live.
Find on the board. ⌘F on a canvas searches cards: type and
matching cards light up, Return glides you match to match (⇧Return goes
back), Esc puts the bar away. It looks through sticky text and page names
alike.
Every card is linkable. Right-click a card ▸ Copy link to card — paste that link on any page (or anywhere on your Mac) and it opens this board with the camera landing on that exact card. And every page knows where it sits: the Context palette's On boards section lists the boards holding a card of the open page, one click from prose to picture.
.mojopad document like any page. Cards reference pages, so a canvas
adds almost nothing to file size.