Canvas

A canvas is an infinite whiteboard for thinking in space: research walls, architecture maps, moodboards, meeting captures. Where most whiteboards hold dead copies, an Undra canvas holds your real, live items, so a note or plan you drop on the board stays in sync with its source.

A canvas isn’t a picture of your workspace. It’s a working view into it: arrange your actual notes and plans, and they stay editable and connected wherever they appear.

Live, not a snapshot

• Embeds are the real thing. A note or plan you drop on the board is the live item, not a screenshot. Edit it on the canvas and the file updates. Edit the file and the card updates.
• One source of truth. The same note can sit on three canvases and in ten wikilinks, and there’s still only one note underneath.

What you can drop

• Sticky cards for plain text or Markdown
• Note embeds, a full, editable note in place
• Plan embeds, a live plan that stays in sync
• Image nodes from your media library
• Groups, coloured frames that hold and move a set of nodes together
• Freehand strokes, a pencil for diagrams and annotations
• Web embeds for a URL or an embedded browser tab

Connect what relates

Drag from one node’s edge to another to draw an edge. Each one supports:

• arrows on one or both ends
• a short label on the line
• styles: solid, dashed, dotted
• routing: curved, orthogonal, or straight

Find your way around

1. Pan by dragging with the middle mouse button, and zoom with Ctrl + Scroll.
2. Double-click an empty spot to drop a card.
3. Double-click an embedded note to edit it right there.
4. Drag from a card’s edge onto another to connect them, then click the label to name the relationship.

Common uses

• A system map. Embed the brief and the launch plan side by side, frame the user-facing and behind-the-scenes pieces in coloured groups, and draw the arrows between them.
• A research wall. Sticky cards and image nodes for everything you’re gathering, pulled into clusters as themes emerge.
• A low-stakes idea board. A scratch canvas for unsorted thinking. Promote things into real notes and plans only when they earn it.

Under the hood

Canvases are .ucanvas files: a small YAML header, then a JSON graph (undra_canvas_v1) of nodes and edges. Embeds reference items by id (noteEmbed, planEmbed), which is exactly why they stay live. Nothing is trapped in a proprietary blob, so the file is readable and versionable like everything else.

Here’s the real Phoenix System map from the interactive demo, trimmed to a few nodes: a note and a plan embedded side by side, joined by a labelled edge.

---
id: oKaA8wve
tags: [phoenix, architecture, diagram]
created_at: "2026-04-01T12:00:00.000Z"
updated_at: "2026-05-02T03:28:00Z"
---

{
  "version": "undra_canvas_v1",
  "nodes": [
    { "id": "title", "type": "text", "x": 80, "y": 40, "width": 520, "height": 120,
      "text": "# Phoenix: System map", "fontSize": 22 },
    { "id": "brief", "type": "noteEmbed", "x": 100, "y": 260, "width": 340, "height": 220,
      "noteId": "FXwXtJHo", "title": "Project Phoenix: Brief" },
    { "id": "plan", "type": "planEmbed", "x": 460, "y": 260, "width": 340, "height": 220,
      "planId": "WiVfqVGl", "title": "Launch plan" }
  ],
  "edges": [
    { "id": "e1", "fromNode": "brief", "toNode": "plan", "label": "informs",
      "arrowEnd": "arrow", "edgeStyle": "curve" }
  ]
}

Where to go next

• Notes: what most canvas cards point back to.
• Plans: embed live work, not a status screenshot.
• Undraverse: see the same connections as a graph.