Canvas Editing

The board canvas supports design-tool editing: drag to select, use shortcuts, and copy/paste across boards. For element meaning, start at Nodes & Edges. For board setup, see the Boards Guide.

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Pointer and hand modes

The canvas has two interaction modes, toggled at the top of the tool rail on the left or with the V and H keys:

Pointer is the default for editors, and your choice persists. Panning still works in either mode with the scroll wheel, middle/right drag, or Space while dragging.

Read-only boards, such as published boards and previews, open in hand mode and do not run editing shortcuts.

Moving around

• Scroll pans; pinch or ⌘ + scroll zooms.
• The zoom readout in the bottom-right corner tracks your zoom live. Click it for the View menu — zoom presets, fit, zoom to selection, auto-arrange, and the background pattern. Undo and redo sit beside it.
• Double-click empty canvas to fit the whole board in view.

On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl throughout.

Auto-arrange

Dragged nodes around and want the automatic layout back? Open the View menu (click the zoom readout) and choose Auto-arrange. Every hand-placed position on the current layer is discarded and the board is laid out again; ⌘Z undoes it. The item is greyed out when nothing has been moved by hand.

Selecting and arranging

Click selects one element; ⌘-click adds to the selection; a pointer-mode drag selects everything it touches. From there:

Nudging and dragging both pin an element. Automatic layout stops repositioning it. A held arrow key counts as one action, so one undo restores the selection.

Select two or more nodes and a floating toolbar appears above them with Group, Duplicate, and Delete for the whole selection.

Renaming inline

Select a node and press Enter (or F2). Its name opens on the canvas with the text selected, so you can type the new name immediately. Enter commits, Escape cancels. Double-clicking the name does the same thing.

Copy, paste, and duplicate

The canvas clipboard copies whole structures. Copying a container includes its children; copying connected nodes includes the edge.

Pasted elements are new elements, with fresh names where needed and edges connected to the copies. One undo removes the whole paste. Menu paste appears where you right-clicked.

Paste works across boards. Copy on one board, open another, even in a different tab, and paste. The clipboard survives navigation.

Two things change through the clipboard:

• A pasted copy is yours. Copying an element that a source owns gives you a plain, hand-authored copy. The source's claim does not come with it. The same goes for a nested layer: the copy does not adopt the original's child layer, which stays where it was.
• Governed boards stage the paste. On an app board, pasted elements arrive as staged additions, badged and reviewable like any other edit.

Copy a style, paste a style

When one element looks right, copy its style to the rest:

Style means appearance: fill, stroke, text color, font, corners, and effects. It excludes shape, icon, size, and position. Pasting a node's style onto an edge applies only the parts an edge can use.

Both actions also sit in the right-click menu, and one undo reverts a style paste across the whole selection.

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