Canvas
Canvas is an infinite spatial workspace where you arrange notes, cards, drawings, and connections freeform — a visual alternative to the linear editor. When an outline can't capture how ideas relate, spread them out and connect them by hand.
What you can put on a canvas
- Note cards — drop existing notes onto the canvas as live cards, or create new ones in place. They stay linked to the underlying
.mdfiles. - Text cards — freeform text blocks for labels, sketches of an idea, or grouping headings.
- Drawings & shapes — sketch, draw shapes, and annotate freehand in an Excalidraw-style surface.
- Media — images and attachments, positioned wherever you want them.
- Connections — draw lines and arrows between any elements to show flow, dependency, or relationship, and label them.
Why use a canvas
Some thinking is spatial. A canvas is the right tool when you're:
- Mapping a project — lay out phases, tasks, and owners and connect what depends on what.
- Planning writing — arrange sections as cards and reorder them visually before committing to an outline.
- Synthesizing research — pull relevant notes onto one surface and cluster them until the structure appears.
- Brainstorming — sketch, connect, and rearrange with no fixed order.
A canvas and your notes reinforce each other: drop your existing notes onto a canvas as cards to see how they relate spatially, then jump back into any card to keep writing in the full editor.
Canvas AI & history
A canvas is more than a static whiteboard. You can put AI to work on the canvas itself — ask it to draft cards from a prompt, expand a cluster into related ideas, summarize a group of notes into a new card, or arrange loose cards into a sensible layout. Because the AI is grounded in your vault, what it generates is built on your own notes, not invented.
And like the rest of Altretta, a canvas keeps its own history: every rearrangement, added card, and connection is captured, so you can travel back to an earlier state of the canvas and see exactly how a map of ideas evolved.
An infinite surface
The canvas is boundless — pan and zoom to give every idea room. Arrange freely: nothing snaps to a grid or a column unless you want it to. Zoom out for the big picture, zoom in to work on one cluster.
Like everything in Altretta, a canvas is saved to a file on your disk and captured in your vault's signed history — you can travel back to an earlier arrangement and see how your thinking evolved.
Next steps
- Back to the section overview: Writing & editing.
- See how your linked notes form a graph across the whole vault from the What is Altretta overview.